Claire Harman: An exemplary modern biography

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

In September 1910 George Calderon visited the World’s Fair in Brussels with Walter Crum, the Coptic scholar. He wrote to Kittie from there: ‘I just met an old gentleman in the street who knew the headmistress in Villette and the French Professor. The street was pulled down 5 months since to build a new railway station.’

I’m a great admirer of the Brontë sisters’ writing, and especially of Charlotte’s ‘impetuous honesty’, as Thackeray called it, but I’d never felt the urge to read everything they wrote (as I did with Jane Austen) and therefore hadn’t read Villette when I came upon this postcard of George’s. By chance, however, two copies of the novel kept surfacing in the house as we were cataloguing some late relatives’ books, so I took the hint and read Villette. Astonishing! Astonishing in its modernity.

On the back of that experience, I decided to read this new biography of Charlotte Brontë by Claire Harman. I can honestly say that this has left me wanting to read all Charlotte’s and Anne’s other works, because Harman teases out so sensitively and enthrallingly not just the sisters’ personal relations but the way they fertilised each other’s writing. Love Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and after this book you will want to read them all.

Harman has written Charlotte Brontë: A Life to coincide with the bicentenary (2016) of Brontë’s birth. Doubtless she has written it to reach as wide a readership as possible, and doubtless she has succeeded. I imagine this is why she has produced what looks like a traditional ‘cradle to grave’ biography. Each chapter has a brief, dry title and beneath it the years the chapter covers. The chronology is in your face. The reader cannot get lost in any Proustian ‘tourbillions of Time’, thank you. In Virginia Woolf’s words about traditional biographies, it ‘plods forwards in the indelible footprints of truth’…

Except that it doesn’t plod for one moment. Harman has enclosed her linearity in a thematic circle. From all the richness and tragedy of Charlotte Brontë’s life, she has chosen to begin with a five-page Prologue entitled ‘1 September 1843’ describing the nadir of Brontë’s despair in Brussels when she, a fierce Protestant, even forced a Catholic priest in the city’s cathedral to listen to her confession — presumably, that she was hopelessly in love with a married man and at the end of her spiritual tether. Concluding her biography, Harman returns to the theme in ‘Coda’ (undated), in which she describes the full human aftermath of Charlotte’s death but concentrates on the behaviour of Constantin Heger, the married ‘French Professor’ who dangled Charlotte on a subtle thread of his own making for the rest of her life. Sensationally, for this reader at least, Harman juxtaposes Charlotte’s assurance to Elizabeth Gaskell that Rochester’s voice crying to Jane Eyre from a great distance was ‘a true thing; it really happened’, with a letter written by Heger to one of his former female pupils forty years after the novel’s publication, describing his own ability to evoke her (the pupil’s) image and ‘communicate’ with her from afar. ‘Was it his habit to attempt such mental communion across long distances and adverse circumstances?’ Harman asks, ‘Or had he simply been reading Jane Eyre?’

Enclosing her cradle to grave biography in this theme is daring, and in my view absolutely right. The relationship that developed between Heger and Brontë in the long dialogue of his teaching her was surely the seminal one of her life. Charlotte returned to it, and him, again and again in her novels, and you could say that that level of ‘soul-to-soul’ communication is the great theme and discovery of her writing. I don’t know whether the hypothesis that Harman puts forward in the closing pages of her biography is original to her, but it certainly gives the book a very satisfying and convincing form.

This biography, despite its overwhelming linearity, subtly exemplifies some of the best features of modern biography. The social, historical dimensions are effortlessly blended in and although Charlotte is always the centre of the narration, you are equally effortlessly (it seems) drawn into the life of the siblings, the Parsonage, the community, Victorian literary London… This is not remotely one of the old ‘great person’ biographies, but democratic and inclusive. Equally, Harman obviously has a deep empathy with her subject, but she ‘comes out of’ that empathy again; occasionally, her style seems touched by Brontë’s, her voice echoes Charlotte’s, but it is very subtly done, never obtrusive. Where sheer information is concerned, the computer age has doubtless helped Harman achieve an impressive sense of exhaustiveness, as it does other modern biographers, though she always scrupulously acknowledges the scholars behind her facts.

So: although not showily innovative, innovative nonetheless and a model of modern biography. How long will it be read, how long will it be the biography of Charlotte Brontë?

Such questions are naive. Like translators, biographers ‘in sequent toil all forwards do contend’, as Shakespeare said of waves. It’s in the nature of human effort that translations and biographies are primarily of and for their time; there is no such thing as a definitive biography or translation. But even if the ‘general reader’ reads only the latest biography, you can be sure that other biographers of Charlotte Brontë will always read Harman — just as any biographer of Chekhov must read Izmailov (1916) and any biographer of George Calderon read Percy Lubbock!