It is called the “Drug like Bronte Dream” and Lane’s thesis
is that all of the Brontes had a capacity for ignoring ordinary life and living
in an imagined world, which gave them scope for their writing.
In real life they were the children of an Irishman (Patrick
Brunty), from a very poor background who had raised himself to becoming
clergyman of the Church of England and a modest success as Curate of Haworth in
Yorkshire. He changed the spelling of his name to Bronte and married an English
girl, by whom he had 6 children. But
while he had raised himself admirably by his own efforts, they were still poor
by middle class standards. Patrick lost
his wife – she died of cancer when the children were very young. Then he lost 2 of his children when he sent
them to a school which he hoped would give them a good education. The school was horrifically harsh. The children were unkindly treated and poorly
fed and looked after. The two older
girls - Maria and Elizabeth -were taken ill and died. He removed the other two girls, Charlotte and
Emily and took them back home to educate them himself.
Patricks’ stipend was small but enough to keep him and his
children frugally. He knew thought that when he died there would be nothing for
them, so he wanted to help them towards earning a living when he was gone. He had particularly high hopes that his only
son Branwell would do very well and would get a good job and be able to help
his sisters. Branwell was clever and
more outgoing than the girls, and it seemed likely, with his talents at writing
and painting that he would be the one to make a success of his life and be able
to provide for his sisters. However, Patrick expected that his daughters might
have to go out as governesses, this being almost the only form of employment
allowable for genteel girls. So he was
anxious to have them well educated also.
The children socialised a little, with the local gentry and
other clergy families but they were very shy and awkward and were happiest in
their own family circle. Because it was
there that they were able to foster their imagination by writing. They created entire fantasy worlds, Gondal
and Angria, and from an early age wrote stories about their characters. What
was unusual about this, Lane points out, is not the creation of a world or writing
and acting out stories – this has been done by other children and even other
families of children who were creative - but the way they did it. Form childhood, they “wrote” books in such a way as to make them look like small print books. They wrote in tiny print because paper was expensive, but they wanted the “books” to look like real published books, right from the earliest age.
The four children spilt up into two pairs, Emily and Anne creating and writing about Gondar and Branwell and Charlotte writing about Angria. They read the papers and used characters from the news of the day, such as the Duke of Wellington, as material for their stories.
Charlotte was able to “switch off” from normal life and hypnotise herself into the world of her characters, to literally “see” them, while she was busy with other routine things. Emily too, was happy when helping with housework and cooking, and it is likely that she also could go into her private world of imagination while doing the household tasks and work out her plots and “see” the people she was writing about.
Charlotte was very shy and socially awkward, but she did her best at times to mix with people. However Emily seemed to reject completely “normal real life” and to choose to live entirely in the imaginary life she had created for herself.
She never worked as a governess, unlike Charlotte or Anne. She went to a school for a time after the disastrous school where her sisters had died, but she was unhappy away from the moors. She then spent a period as a teacher in a private school and later as a pupil teacher in a respected Brussels school, with Charlotte. She never made any friends outside the family, and lived for her writing and her rambling on the moors.
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