2 - The Haworth context

Summary

According to one particularly infatuated Brontë critic of the 1940s, ‘These sisters owed less than any other great writers to contemporary currents of religious and political opinion, and more perhaps than any to gifts descending direct to them from heaven with no human intermediary.’ The political and sexual underpinnings of such hagiography are fascinating. It presumably rests on a reading of the novels which marginalizes the Luddite framework of Shirley and the virulent anti-Catholicism of Villette, and entirely disregards the mid-Victorian ideology of self-help which imbues. The Professor. Such readings persist, even in contemporary criticism, because they continue to fulfil crucial ideological functions, though their origins lie far back in the original mid-nineteenth-century accounts which similarly emphasized the Brontës' cultural isolation. Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, for example, carefully chronicles the fact that the entire road from Keighley to Haworth was built up, and then speaks of the dreamy, supernatural cast of mind the children acquired from dwelling in such seclusion. Harriet Martineau for her part attributes the ‘coarseness’ of Charlotte Brontë's fiction to the fact of her living ‘among the wild Yorkshire hills, with a father who was too much absorbed in his studies to notice her occupations, in a place where newspapers were never seen (or where she never saw any)’.

Although readers in the south of England might still subscribe to myths of Yorkshire wildness, Martineau's assertions held no basis in fact even in the nineteenth century.