4 - ‘That indefinable something’: Charlotte Brontë and Protest

Summary

Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) often revolves around distance. In a 1916 TLS leader on the centenary of her birth, she emphasises above all Brontë’s remoteness –geographical, social and temporal –from modern metropolitan society:

When we think of her we have to imagine someone who had no lot in our modern world; we have to cast our minds back to the fifties of the last century, to a remote parsonage upon the wild Yorkshire moors. Very few now are those who saw her and spoke to her; and her posthumous reputation has not been prolonged by any circle of friends. (E 2.26)

However, she admits, this distance is mediated by a flourishing afterlife which brings before the modern reader ‘a picture of Charlotte Brontë, which is as definite as that of a living person, and one may venture to say that to place her name at the head of a page will cause a more genuine interest than almost any other inscription’ (E 2.26–7). Virginia Woolf was well qualified to judge Brontë’s interest to a modern readership: her discussions of Charlotte Brontë span her career, and range from her first published article, ‘Haworth, November 1904’, two centenary reviews (1916 and 1917), and a Common Reader essay to prominent discussion in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. These texts demonstrate the continued relevance of Brontë’s life and work to her audience as well as her own reading and writing, and grapple with female authorship, Victorian womanhood and biographical legacies.

It is no coincidence that Woolf prioritises Charlotte over her sisters. The only one of the Brontës to cultivate strong friendships outside of her family, and subject of a biography by fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s more extensively documented life offers itself as a case study for a number of issues, while Emily’s incontestable genius becomes a trope of its own and Anne remains largely ignored. Cora Kaplan notes of more recent feminist debates about women’s subjectivity and experience that ‘Jane Eyre, its heroine and its author (the distinctions between book character and writer are frequently blurred) have acted as a kind of cultural magnet [ … ], drawing widely dispersed issues into the novel’s field of meaning’.