The Brontes and the ultimate taboo

Independent Newspapers

Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte and Anne Bronte

The document is tiny. Its 19 pages are the size of your credit card. Its author was 14 years old. And it is expected to reach in the region of £300,000 when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s auction house on December 15.

For this is a lost story by none other than Charlotte Bronte, author of Jane Eyre, and a member of the famous family who lived in the parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire.

Our fascination with the Bronte sisters is seemingly inexhaustible. This autumn alone, there have been new films of Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Director Andrea Arnold’s brooding, silent Wuthering Heights is the 27th film adaptation of this book.

Both films have as their backdrop the bleak moorland landscape which was so formative in the Bronte sisters’ strange and secluded lives. But for all their insular existence, the stormy passion contained in the pages of the books shocked readers — as well as gripping them — when they were first published in the 1840s.

Emily Bronte was all passion, and Wuthering Heights makes clear her obsessions with some of the darkest subjects of all. The story concerns a forbidden love between its heroine Catherine and the brooding Heathcliff.

There are hints of incest (Heathcliff and Catherine are brought up as brother and sister); race (Heathcliff is a ‘dark-skinned gypsy’ and actually black in the new film); and even necrophilia (Heathcliff is obsessed with Catherine’s corpse after she dies).

Charlotte Bronte was a more balanced character than Emily, and her story in Jane Eyre of the plain little governess who attracts the love of her boss — a swarthy, rather villainous squire who secretly keeps a mad wife in the attic — is of perennial fascination to the addicts of romance.

But the newly discovered little story of Charlotte’s coming up for auction contains its own dark suggestions of incest — and of madness as well.

Where did this darkness and turbulent passion come from? An answer of sorts can be found in that extraordinary house Haworth Parsonage — now one of the best literary museums in the world — where the Bronte children saw out their short and all too tragic lives.

Not only did they lose their mother, Maria, to cancer when the oldest child was just seven years old. But of six siblings — five of them girls — two died before reaching their teens and none lived beyond the age of 39.

Visitors to Howarth will know that Charlotte Bronte, her sisters and her brother Branwell jotted down many poems and stories in just such tiny booklets as the one which has been recently discovered.

Tightly written on minute pieces of paper, and illustrated, these stories reveal the imagined worlds in which the closely-knit family all lived.

Thousands come every year to see the tiny books, the tiny rooms the family inhabited, the tiny clothes worn by these tiny reclusive people, and to savour the (if we are honest, rather unwholesome) fantasies which were concocted by a family of eccentric introverts in that remote, cramped residence.

Emily, the tall sister, (5ft 6in) invented a world called Gondal, a mystical land of magic, to escape the sorrow that never left her over her mother’s death. Charlotte, more practical, and minute, invented the Kingdom of Angria.

In these stories, she imagined herself being swept off her feet by the Marquess of Douro — the title belonging to the Duke of Wellington’s heir — whom she renamed Zamorna.

The tiny books at Haworth number tens of thousands of words, and they are a sign of how much the Brontes lived in their own world, how cut off they were from outsiders.

When neighbours visited the parsonage they noted how, in the presence of strangers, these little people would hug one another like timorous animals huddling against predators.

They spoke not with the local Yorkshire dialect, but with the Northern Irish brogue of their father, the Rev Patrick Bronte. He was a remarkable man, born into abject poverty in Ulster, the son of an agricultural labourer. Cleverness took him to Cambridge and into the Church.

He married Maria Bramwell, a Cornish woman, and they had six children in quick succession between 1814 and 1820 — Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick (always known as Branwell), Emily and Anne. Mother died in 1821, the year they all moved to Haworth.

It was a remote, semi-industrial village, built on the edge of the moors — the railway did not come until 1867. A report by a public health inspector said it was one of the least sanitary villages in England, and had not a single water closet. The water supply came into the village after flowing through the over-full burial ground beside the church. Half the population died before the age of six and the average life expectancy was 26.

When they were old enough, the Bronte girls were sent to one of the most horrible boarding schools in England — Cowan Bridge, which Charlotte would describe in the fictional school of Lowood when she came to write Jane Eyre. The Cowan Bridge headmaster, the Rev Carus Wilson, was a religious maniac who felt it was his Christian duty to torture children. Seventy girls shared one outside lavatory, which was a hole in the ground.

It was freezing cold and they were kept on starvation rations. If a child died, as often happened, headmaster felt he had sent them to Heaven. ‘I bless God,’ he announced, when one child died, ‘that he has taken from us the child of whose salvation we have best hope.’

He was never confident of the salvation of Charlotte, and beat her mercilessly. Two of the Bronte sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of consumption (tuberculosis) within two weeks of each other aged just 11 and 12 while pupils at Cowan Bridge. After that Mr Bronte brought all his children home, where their introspection and dependency upon one another increased.

They sketched. They told one another stories — Charlotte remembered them pacing about the rooms excitedly as they did so. This weird household of over-excitable, sickly young people was to be the imaginative powerhouse which produced some of the most wonderful novels in the English language.

The little toy magazine story by Charlotte which is coming up for auction contains a swaggering hero who sets fire to his bed — a foreshadowing of the mad Mrs Rochester setting fire to the house in Jane Eyre, and of Rochester being blinded in the conflagration. It happens that the real-life Bronte girls’ brother, Branwell, set fire to his bed and would have died had they not put the fire out.

He was a (highly creative) drunkard and drug addict plagued by delirium tremens. Other than their reclusive father, Branwell was the only man in the sisters’ lives for years, which perhaps explains Emily’s obsession with incest.

Apart from the disastrous experience of boarding school, the only time they went away for any significant period was when their father sent Charlotte and Emily to Brussels in 1842 to perfect their French. Emily hated it and could not wait to get back to Yorkshire. Her whole life was bound up in the moors and all her poetry, all her emotional life, took place in the solitude of Haworth.

Charlotte, by contrast, wanted all her life to get away from the parsonage. She fell in love in Brussels, with M. Heger — a professor who was helping the young English governess with her French. She poured the painful experience of totally unrequited love into her novels.

It was in 1847 that a London publisher — Smith, Elder and Co — received a novel by one Currer Bell: it was called Jane Eyre. Another publisher, T.C.Newby, brought out Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell. Both books, presented under pseudonyms, are pressure cookers with the lid firmly screwed on. They are so powerful because they are about frustrated passion.

And Jane Eyre, in particular, achieves its spectacular success by being a fantasy to which so many can respond — namely that a plain little woman can win the heart of a romantic hero and succeed in finding love against all the odds.

‘Finished Jane Eyre, which is really a wonderful book, very peculiar in parts, but so powerfully and admirably written, such a fine tone it is, such fine religious feeling, and such beautiful writings.’ That was the opinion of another plain little woman — Queen Victoria herself.

Charlotte Bronte was the only one of the siblings to find anything like emotional satisfaction in life as well as in fantasy.

Her brother Branwell’s love life was a disaster. He could have been a good painter, but got a job at Luddendenfoot railway station 20 miles from Howarth, and had an unhappy affair with the station master’s wife, a Mrs Robinson, 20 years his senior. He died from abuse of opium and drink aged 31.

Like all his siblings, Branwell had tuberculosis, which carried off Emily at the age of 30 and Anne a few weeks later, aged 28.

When all the other siblings had died, Charlotte, in her late thirties, married Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. She found a happiness she had never known before, and she soon became pregnant.

But she had not shaken off the tuberculosis which afflicted them all, and hers was a sickly pregnancy, made worse by chills picked up by walking on the moors in her minuscule shoes. (You can still see them in Haworth — they are like doll’s shoes).

Her appetite diminished to almost nothing. She took to her bed. She still could not quite believe, though, that she was going to share the miserable end of her siblings.

‘Oh, I am not going to die, am I? We have been so happy!’ she exclaimed to poor Mr Nicholls.

She died on March 31, 1855. She was 39. Mr Nicholls stayed on with old Mr Bronte in the parsonage until the vicar died, six years later. He then retired to Ireland, and lived on until 1906, having married again.

He remained in love with Charlotte all his life, and when he died, his second wife had his coffin placed beneath Charlotte’s portrait before it was carried out to burial.

It is thanks to Mr Nicholls that the Bronte children’s little books, drawings, clothes and other memorabilia have been preserved.

The extraordinary gifts of the Brontes spring from the hidden well of genius. But genius has to be planted in a nourishing soil.

And the strangeness of this tragedy-struck family, the ‘unhealthy’ fantasies they indulged, combined with Patrick Bronte’s determination to instil in them an intellectual seriousness and a pursuit of learning, enabled the genius to flourish.

The discovery of the little short story by Charlotte Bronte will excite the booksellers and the speculators, and be of great interest to scholars. But in the end it is the human element of this document which brings us out in goose-flesh.

Like the clothes she left behind, the tiny nature of this document brings her, for some reason, vividly to life again.

Seeing the miniature pages, we are once again in the enclosed, claustrophobic atmosphere of that parsonage, in the depths of winter, with the wind howling outside on the Yorkshire moors, and a group of children, hyperactive and flushed with tubercular blushes, exclaiming their fantastical tales, as, in the room over the corridor, their short-sighted and miserable father mourns his wife, hunched over his Greek Bible. – Daily Mail

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Redefining music and romance in Hindi cinema

You’ve got to hand it to Ranbir Kapoor for having high rankings, charming his fans, and thriving in the Bollywood industry. After all, he’s the fourth generation of the Kapoors, the first family of Indian cinema, and also the third generation of two prime musical stars, grandfather Raj Kapoor, and father Rishi Kapoor. Ranbir Kapoor is the grandnephew of the late Shammi Kapoor, the third prime musical star who redefined music and romance in Hindi cinema.

During an interview with India-West, the soft-spoken pedigreed performer talks about his new discoveries and aspirations.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q: You suggested Shammi Kapoor’s name to Imtiaz and also persuaded your granduncle to do the film, right?

A: Yes, Shammi Kapoor saab plays my guru, who is a shehnai ustad in the film. He has only a few sequences but the highlight is a jugalbandi between him and his sitar and me on my guitar. I confess that I conned him for three hours, almost blackmailing him emotionally to accept the role as he was unsure of doing the film because of his health. He was having to undergo dialysis thrice a week and was restricted to his wheelchair. But he did it for me and in the Delhi schedule, he would get his dialysis done there. I am very emotional about this gesture.

Q: As of now, he is the only Kapoor you have co-starred with in a film.

A: Oh, he is the original rockstar of Hindi cinema! All my preconceived notions about him as a megastar were dispelled in a moment when he came on the sets-he was like a little boy, nervous and anxious, and always insisting on rehearsals. But he shared such fantastic experiences of his times with us. He would also interact with Composer A.R. Rahman and get into discussions about Apple, Mac and music.

Q: Ironically, he had made some satirical comments about Rahman and his music in an interview just before signing the film.

A: That’s strange. He did get to hear the music CD and had liked it.

Q: What does “Rockstar” mean to you?

A: I want the film to do well. Less for myself, but more for the team and above all, for the immense sacrifice and hard work of one man called Imtiaz Ali, who has made the film with so much love.

Q: On the inlay of the album, Imtiaz has stated that the film and its music “made itself.” What is your take on that?

A: Well, it was a special film from the beginning with all the right energies happening, but I think Imtiaz was the sole reason why all that happened. He is a genuine person, does not take work for granted and understands key aspects like Indian people and culture and the complexities of relationships. He could have made yet another “Jab We Met” or “Love Aaj Kal” to ensure a safe run, but he chose to go a different way.

Q: Arising from that, a rock-centric musical as a genre has not worked here.

A: I don’t think you can call “Rockstar” a rock music-based film. It is a love story that is rooted in India with the role of a lifetime for me. The music is in that sense incidental as the hero wants to become a rockstar.

Q: For the first time, however, you participated in a major way, with the music. Would you call it self-discovery, given the rich musical heritage of Raj Kapoor and your father?

A: I would. It was such a great experience sitting on all eight tracks as well as the music pieces. For the first time, I really got involved in the songs, and observed how Mohit Chauhan sang and why. This helped me perform on screen during the song sequences.

Q: Purely a personal opinion, but when I hear Mohit sing, his vocal tenor does not make me visualize you on screen.

A: I hope that the audiences here do not find any disconnect between the voice and me. The choice of Mohit was unanimous so far as Imtiaz, composer Rahman sir and I were concerned.

Q: How was the Rahman experience, with you being parked in his studio several nights for the making of the soundtrack?

A: Rahman sir is so humble. You have to see his passion for hard work. He works in isolation, when he has a relationship only with music, which is why it was so wonderful to get into his studio so many times and watch him make music.

Q: The buzz is that you were highly involved with this music because you had initially given short shrift to lip sync numbers as per global sensibilities and now found yourself short of songs to perform on concert tours and shows.

A: (Seriously) Yes, that’s true. I do need a bank of music for my stage shows, which so far has been restricted largely to the songs of “Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani,” but that was not a musical. “Rockstar” is the first film in which I learned to participate in and contribute to a song at all stages. I even learned to play the guitar.

Q: What is special about your character, Janardhan/Jordan?

A: I would say that it is Imtiaz’s contribution. I am in no way an actor with a huge reservoir of experiences, but Imtiaz shared so much of his life experiences, his angst, and his intensity with me that performing the role became very easy. There are not many filmmakers who do that for their actors. His friendship is something that I have definitely taken away with me from the film. Even Nargis Fakhri surrendered completely as an actor to him and bravely treaded terrain that would have been otherwise difficult for any new actor.

Q: Arising from that, how would you react to a celebrity stating on Twitter, “I wish Ranbir stops trying hard to be just an actor and concentrates on becoming a star?”

A: I want to be not just the best actor but the biggest star! I also want to produce and direct films like Raj Kapoor and my father did. I know it will need a lot of sacrifices, but I will reach there one day. I am grateful for everything that I have got, but there is a long way to go. I am all for balancing the “masala movies” that I get, which are important to bring in the revenue, with a “Wake Up Sid!” and “Rocket Singh – Salesman Of The Year.” I have no false illusions about myself – I know that I cannot do yet what the Khans do or have a “Singham” to my name. But I am comfortable with every kind of film and good actors will always last, like dad has done for four decades.

Q: But in the star-versus-actor tussle, what do you feel about star images in the matter of career longevity? Do they help or hinder?

A: Hats off to the seniors for lasting as long as they did though, and maybe partly because they were categorized largely in a single genre, like my father Rishi Kapoor, who I think is the greatest actor of his generation. He never had a style, was so spontaneous, and was a successful lover boy for over two decades! Today cinema has progressed and actors have become fearless.

Q: What next?

A: I have a great role in Anurag Basu’s “Barfee” and I am looking forward to Ayan Mukerji’s “Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani.” But I want to take up direction really soon. I am working on a couple of ideas.

Q: That’s great news! As of now, your personal relationships and issues grab far more print-space than your work. According to a recent article in a Mumbai tabloid, it says you’ve had seven relationships with actresses.

A: (In a shocked tone): Seven???? Wow! That’s six more than I know! Well, I guess we are easy targets for the media. I had just one relationship with an actress that I was always open about. But I really hope to make people forget about anything other than my work in the films and years to come.

FILMOGRAPHY

(Hits/Successes in Capitals)

2007 – Saawariya

2008 – BACHNA AE HASEENO

2009 – WAKE UP SID! (in Mumbai), AJAB PREM KI GHAZAB KAHANI, Rocket Singh – Salesman of the Year

2010 – RAAJNEETI, Anjaana Anjaani

2011 – ROCKSTAR (Released 11.11.11)

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