Being the Brontes

In 1846, three sisters - scribbling, arguing,

marching round this table night after night -

created three of the greatest novels in the English language.

Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey

were published within weeks of one another,

immediately delighting and shocking the public.

One woman said about Jane Eyre that if it wasn't written by a man,

then it must've been written by a sexual delinquent.

The novels are filled with unforgettable characters.

Plain Jane, brooding Mr Rochester,

steadfast Agnes

and the tormented Heathcliff.

It feels as if you're putting yourself at risk

just by opening the covers of a book.

The books seemed to come out of nowhere, as did their authors -

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte -

three clergyman's daughters from the wilds of West Yorkshire.

As three long-time Bronte fans, we want to find out how these

sheltered young spinsters produced

three immortal works so quickly.

Can we discover the secrets of their creative genius by stepping into their lives,

by being the Brontes?

I feel very comfortable in this. I'm very happy with this.

It's sparking something deep within me.

What will we learn when we venture out into

the windswept landscapes that inspired them?

-You do not want to get lost on the moors.

-That's the spirit, Oyeyemi.

What does their sibling rivalry reveal?

It's kind of like an act of betrayal.

Charlotte must've been scared.

What insights will we gain from sharing their household chores...

..and learning about their professional misadventures?

Anne Bronte's charges were being so unpleasant

that she'd tied them to a table leg.

We'll even witness a Bronte wedding...

I will.

..to find out how Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte

tore open the tight-laced Victorian novel

and won a place in the hearts of readers forever.

In 1845, the three Bronte sisters

were all living back home

here in Haworth, in West Yorkshire.

They were unemployed, unmarried and unhappy.

Beneath the shy exterior of Charlotte, the oldest,

lay a burning ambition, and she's long had a grip on my imagination.

One day, when I was about 11 or 12, I took down a really

heavy-looking volume from a high-up shelf with

no pictures or anything in it

and it was called Jane Eyre.

I knew it was a story of a girl, and once I started reading,

I was just in that world.

Her childhood, the brutal treatment of that boarding school,

it gave me nightmares.

Then, I suppose, when I was older, it was the passionate love affair,

of course, with Mr Rochester. Who is more romantic than Mr Rochester?

And I suppose that's something that's always intrigued me,

that the fact it was this intensely shy, frail woman, Charlotte Bronte,

who managed to create such a passionate book.

I wonder where that came from?

The sisters wrote and grew up together,

but had distinct personalities and styles.

Emily Bronte drew on the supernatural and the Gothic

for her dark family saga, Wuthering Heights.

The book has been an inspiration for novelist Helen Oyeyemi

ever since she had read it as a teenager.

But Emily herself remains something of a mystery.

Reading Wuthering Heights for the first time was one of the most

intense experiences I've ever had while sitting still.

You have no idea who or what on earth Emily Bronte might be,

you just have the sense of a wild and singular imagination.

This powerful mind.

Her characters are so intense and go to such extremes,

it seems as if there's nothing that they won't say or do.

STEAM TRAIN WHISTLES

Journalist Lucy Mangan is fascinated by the youngest Bronte sister,

Anne, whose work was grounded in the social injustices of her day.

I've always loved Anne because,

well, mainly because she's the underdog of the three sisters.

And, I mean, who doesn't love an underdog?

She's the forgotten Bronte.

She was quieter than Charlotte and, frankly, less weird than Emily.

And I think there's a sense of...

to the noisy and the weird - the spoils -

and Anne hasn't quite had her due.

What I love about Anne is that she writes about real people.

There's none of your Gothic melodrama here.

Her first book, Agnes Grey, is an absolutely unsparing look

at the lot of an exploited governess.

It's not exactly agitprop, but her approach

is an almost campaigning one.

So I'm off to Haworth for the first time ever

and I'm really fascinated to try and get a sense of her

and the rest of them in their natural habitat.

Anne, Emily and Charlotte wrote their first novels together

in the dining room of the home - the parsonage at Haworth,

where their father Patrick was the local clergyman.

Well, here we are.

Amazing.

I can't quite believe we're actually in here.

There's something, isn't there,

about a place where writers have been?

You get this whole atmosphere.

Look, Jane Eyre.

Guys, as if I needed any more confirmation

that Emily Bronte was here,

here's some graffiti.

-An E.

-It would be Emily, wouldn't it?

-It would.

Wuthering Heights for you.

I think this is Anne's writing slope.

So, if I may just hold Agnes Grey over the place where it was written.

-You're acting like it's a shrine.

-It is a shrine. It is a shrine.

You can just imagine them here,

just spurring each other on to greatness or having massive rows.

I'm a bit overwhelmed by how present they feel in this room.

They do feel present, don't they?

There is a spirit of the Brontes' past somehow around us.

-Nonsense, Kearney. Nonsense.

-There is.

Seeing the table where the sisters wrote

and their personal effects has given us a taste of the Bronte magic.

But it was magic conjured in the midst of a tragedy

unfolding at the parsonage.

The sisters weren't just crammed in here with their father,

there was also a fourth Bronte sibling - their brother, Branwell.

In 1845, the one-time golden boy of the family

was descending into alcoholism.

Branwell used to write with the sisters, particularly Charlotte.

He also painted the most famous picture of them,

ominously painting himself out before the portrait was finished.

Now, he was a shadow of his former self.

I just think it must have been so painful for Charlotte to see

the disintegration of the brother she had been so close to,

and living with an addict like that brought real shame on the family.

I mean, she didn't want to have visitors coming here to the parsonage

and I suppose it all really came to a head -

it was a breaking point, really - on the night of 31 July 1845,

when she came back and she found him drunk right here.

She wrote about it in a letter to a friend.

She said, "He thought of nothing but stunning

"or drowning his distress of mind.

"no-one in the house could have rest."

So, just imagine that -

upstairs, her brother, raving through alcohol,

and some people even think that this was the origin for the idea

of the mad woman in the attic, that famous plotline from Jane Eyre.

Upstairs, there was this madman - her own brother.

Charlotte realised that Branwell would never be able to work

and provide for the family.

The sisters' prospects were bleak.

But then Charlotte discovered several poems Emily had written,

hidden in her desk.

Emily was furious that her privacy had been invaded.

But for the ambitious Charlotte, it was a eureka moment.

Maybe the sisters could earn a living from writing.

This was what brought Charlotte, Emily and Anne together,

writing around the dining-room table at the end of 1845.

And within weeks, they weren't just writing poems,

they'd embarked on their first novels.

It was kind of like an act of betrayal, wasn't it?

That for Emily, you know, for Charlotte to go into this private world,

she hated that, didn't she?

I do not want to be the sister who discovers her private poetry

and goes, "Hey! Just happened across this, I think we should publish."

No way, Charlotte must've been scared.

There must have been some sort of struggle going on.

Anne, as ever, is playing the peacemaker, really.

Because she sees what's kicking off over here and she goes,

"I've got some poems too." And she doesn't mind publishing,

so maybe that's what makes the possibility of publication

a bit more palatable to Emily.

Charlotte, I think, she from quite early on seemed to want to have

-some kind of external...

-Some kind of public recognition.

-Public recognition.

It was Charlotte who was both practical and wanting the recognition,

but she somehow knew that Emily and Anne would fall in.

She must have known that if she could get this project going

that they would be behind her.

So what do you think it was, the spur for the Brontes

to decide to embark on novels?

It's a perfect storm.

Because they're all suddenly at home for one reason or another,

they've all got this great, I think, confidence in their talent

and now you've almost got nothing to lose.

They were looking to earn a living, weren't they?

I mean, they were... They needed money.

It's all coming together in a very Bronte-like, unhappy way.

It must have felt like a now-or-never situation

and that must have aided the speed with which they got going.

So where did these sisters find the confidence to produce,

in short order,

Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's Agnes Grey

and Charlotte's Jane Eyre?

Well, the Brontes had long been writing for their own pleasure.

They were practised - if unpublished - authors.

And the sisters had a genius for drawing inspiration

from their own lives.

So what secrets of the Brontes' writing can we learn from

exploring their childhoods?

One of the most shocking parts of Jane Eyre

is the story of her schooldays.

But how much does it owe to reality?

I've come to Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, where Charlotte was

sent away to boarding school at the age of eight.

Beware, lest your God,

THE MOST HIGH, rise up in judgment

and condemns you.

The school was founded by William Carus Wilson,

a religious zealot who imposed a harsh regime on his pupils,

including Charlotte, Emily and their elder sisters

Maria and Elizabeth.

This is one of Wilson's actual sermons and it's reminiscent

of the kind of teaching to which Jane Eyre is subjected.

For he examines us as to the integrity

and strength of that hope.

It must've been terrifying for them.

Can you imagine hearing that as a small child?

There is no hope, there is no hope of salvation...

..but through the bloodshedding and the...

I'm going to meet Marianne Thormahlen,

who's studied the school's regime.

Mr Wilson's religion was very much a hellfire religion

and a death religion.

He had this idea that it was better for a child to die young,

before he or she had chance to commit a multitude of sins.

-It really was a brutal place, wasn't it?

-It really was.

The physical conditions were terrible - cold and dark -

and these children were permanently semi-starved.

-Their father wanted the best for his girls...

-Oh, absolutely.

-..but it ended in tragedy.

-Yes, indeed.

The two elder girls fell ill at school

and were sent home to die, basically.

Maria after a few months, Elizabeth after a few weeks.

It seems clear that Charlotte later re-imagined her sister's deaths

in the passage where Jane Eyre's school friend Helen

dies in her arms.

"That last bit of coughing has tired me a little.

"I feel as if I could sleep.

"But don't leave me, Jane. I like to have you near me.

"I'll stay with you, dear Helen. No-one shall take me away."

The only sister who didn't experience

the horrors of Cowan Bridge

was the youngest, Anne.

But even at home, she couldn't escape the shadow of death.

I mean, the thing about the parsonage, as everyone knows,

is that obviously it looks out onto that extraordinary landscape of the moors.

But the front of the house faces a bleaker prospect. It's Haworth -

an industrialising mill town - and almost right outside the door

is the local graveyard.

At one point, six or seven people were being buried a day.

Which is no surprise in a town where the child mortality rate was 40%.

40% of children died before the age of six.

In the industrial north, growth always came at a price.

But the price Haworth paid seems to have been particularly high.

-1845, what's Haworth like?

-It's a bustling little mill town.

It's not completely modern. It's not like Manchester,

one of the shock cities of the age. But it is industrialising,

there are three mills in the town. So it's growing in population,

it grows quite substantially over the period.

But no great hopes, presumably, that the

infrastructure is going to keep up with that kind of expansion?

No, not at all. Exactly.

There are privies, there is no running water.

And the privies are just these open, public conveniences.

Up to 24 families sharing one privy. Some of them are in public view.

One is placed on an eminence at the top of the high street.

So there might be dozens of people all using this earth privy,

visible to everybody around them.

And this is the world that the sisters would be walking

past on a daily basis.

What are the mortality rates like, then, in this filthy town?

They're shocking. The average age of death is about 25 or 26.

-Really?

-So the Brontes live into their late 20s.

And, in a way, they get beyond the average at that age.

OK, I'm going to have to take a moment there to

re-jig my notions of the Brontes as the lucky ones.

But the Bronte children found somewhere to escape from this

harsh reality.

Between them, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily

and Anne created their own fantasy world.

SWORDS CLASH

It was inspired by a set of toy soldiers that Branwell had been

given by their father.

The children played with the soldiers out on the moors,

inventing stories about them

and drawing detailed maps, like this one.

"Soon, the piles of bleeding retches rose under our feet.

"We trampled remorselessly upon friend and enemy."

Inspired by the popular periodicals of the day,

they wrote up some of their stories in an unusual format.

So this is one of the tiny books.

They wrote these little books.

There were magazines made for the toy soldiers.

So, basically, they were intended for them to read.

Oh, so that's why they were so tiny in the first place.

-Oh, yeah.

-So, you can see here how small.

-That's astonishing.

You see, that gives me goose bumps, "1830, Charlotte Bronte."

-Isn't that incredible?

-Are they writing with quill pens?

-Yes.

-That's insane.

Sorry, that's just physically impossible.

It's amazing, isn't it?

They're completely uninhibited in front of each other, aren't they?

-When it comes to writing.

-Yeah, completely.

I mean, I think it really helped, the fact that they were siblings,

because I think the sibling rivalry played the major part in it.

That even though there was this close connection, there was

a sense of powering on through this saga,

because they wanted to get one over on one another.

So you think they have a sort of perfect mixture of security

-and spur?

-Exactly.

The children christened their imaginary realm Glass Town.

The stories were influenced by the adult periodicals they all read.

Some are surprisingly graphic.

So you have, obviously, themes of war.

Branwell's violent battle sagas, which are hideous to read

in all ways, because it's like a stream of consciousness.

"Listen, what a roar.

"Hideously broken and rattling and deep and trembling."

And also Charlotte as well,

in terms of the way that the men are presented.

They're very tyrannous, they're sexually alluring.

"The full, dark, refulgent eye lightens most gloriously.

"Suddenly, he lifts his head and stands erect and godlike."

And do you think this character prefigures

-some of the characters in her adult fiction?

-Certainly.

-Mr Rochester, for example?

-Certainly in terms of command and presence.

Almost, you know, brutish masculinity.

It certainly forums in the juvenilia.

Emily and Anne went on to create a separate world of their own,

ruled by women, called Gondal.

"I dream of moor and misty hill, where evening closes dark and chill.

"For lone among the mountains cold,

"lie those that I have loved of old."

How important was Gondal to Emily?

It was... I would say it was incredibly important.

I don't think that she ever broke away from her world of Gondal.

Even when she was writing Wuthering Heights.

So much of Gondal fed into Wuthering Heights.

All the themes - such as exile, death, imprisonment,

separation from loved ones.

All of these are staple themes of Wuthering Heights.

Intrigued, Helen and I try writing own little books.

-Have you ever written with one of these before?

-No.

Well, let alone trying to do it in this kind of tiny...

Without blotting. That's what all the Victorian girls got into trouble

-for, wasn't it?

-Oh, yeah.

-Ink blots.

-Blotting your copy book.

-Oh! Well, I started with a blot.

-Yeah, me too.

-Every letter is a blot.

-Yeah.

The scratching is really causing some tension for me.

-I used to create small books, actually.

-Did you?

I had a doll's house. I loved the idea of doing it.

It's really funny, it's just come back to me.

Another blot.

The Brontes' imaginary worlds were rooted in the reality

of the moors that surrounded Haworth.

And the sisters carried on their childhood passion for walking

and exploring the moors through to adulthood.

"There are great moors behind and on each hand of me.

"There are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet."

"On one side of the road rose a high, rough bank, where hazels

"and stunted oaks with their roots half exposed held uncertain tenure.

"And strong winds had blown some nearly horizontal."

We're going to retrace one of the sisters' favourite walks,

to the waterfall near Ponden Kirk, using a map from the time.

I do not want to get lost on the moors.

That's the spirit, Emily.

Oh, this map is not going to stay.

Oh, that wind! They wouldn't have needed maps, would they?

They'd have known this landscape so intimately.

They walked it, tramped it, for hours and hours.

No idea how they managed it in gale-forces, like this.

Why do I feel we're not quite as hardy as the Bronte sisters?

And we've got all the kit as well.

They were out here in skirts and hobnailed boots at best.

It would have been so liberating for them.

If you think of the kind of constraints they were under.

You know, the world of corsets and conventions.

And it kind of makes you want to race around now and shout

and scream, doesn't it?

-Can you imagine if you'd come out of the parsonage?

-Yeah.

"I wish I were out of doors.

"I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free.

"I'm sure I should be myself,

"were I once among the heather on those hills."

Do you remember that wonderful scene in Jane Eyre?

She's escaping from Rochester

and she spends the night on the moors, at her wits' end.

And I think, you know, even on a day like this, it's very bleak.

The idea of spending the night was extraordinary,

but, for her, the moor is a place of sanctuary.

She talks about the moor being her mother,

giving her a place of refuge and safety.

Anne's got a poem about the wind on the moors as well.

I think it's this thing where she lies on the pathless moor

and she listens to the wind

and she can start to understand its language.

-I'm not going to lie down, but I sort of see what she means.

-Yeah.

The moors as refuge,

the moors as a companion that speaks a language that only you understand.

It's no wonder that the sisters loved being out here.

Oh, there's a waterfall.

-Wow. Lovely, isn't it?

-Oh, yes.

It feels so remote and so wild, doesn't it?

So, for all their apparently sheltered lives,

Charlotte, Emily and Anne already had a rich body of early experience

to summon up when they embarked on their first novels.

But during the winter of 1845,

as the sisters huddled round the dining-room table,

their writing could also draw on more recent events in their lives.

With no money at home, all three had been obliged to leave

to earn a living.

How did those experiences influence their work?

Anne, the youngest sister, spent the longest time in full employment.

Even though her career options were somewhat limited.

"Wanted, a governess, not under 25 years of age, who is competent

"to teach French, music, dancing and the rudiments of Italian.

"Ladies expecting a high salary need not apply."

Best to get it out there, I think. It saves time wasters.

If it was the 1840s and I was a middle-class,

reasonably well-educated young women,

this is all that is open to me. I can't be a doctor,

I can't be a lawyer.

I can't go to university, cos they're too expensive

and they're only for men. I could become an actress,

but that's practically synonymous with being a prostitute.

So I've come to Audley End in Essex,

where I'm told a 19th-century governess' room still exists.

It's interesting that both Anne and Charlotte worked as governesses,

like their heroines in Jane Eyre and Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey.

Agnes is a high-minded daughter of a clergyman

who becomes a governess so that she can make her own way in the world.

She gets a brutal awakening when working for two families,

the Bloomfields and the Murrays.

If you're Anne and you're confronted with this pile,

you can't help but look at something like this and think,

that's a place for stories.

But at the same time, as on a sort of human, 19-year-old girl level,

that is an intimidating prospect. Poor Anne, I think.

Poor, poor Anne.

So this is the governess' bedroom.

It's right next to the nursery.

They're all just on the other side of that thin little wall there.

She's got this fetching number.

Oh, it's quite a weight.

It's not designed for you to express your personality through.

This sort of single concession to femininity here,

with its little lace collar.

But, basically, it's to make you into

something between an official servant and invisible.

Or at least anonymous.

I think Anne was exquisitely attuned to the politics

of wealth and class.

As a governess, Agnes Grey basically goes from being

a middle-class woman to a domestic servant.

She has to project a particular kind of image

to keep her employers happy.

OK, so, it's 1840-something, my parents have just lost everything

and they're booting me out to work.

I suppose what I need to know is would the ability to quote

Victoria Wood appropriately do me any good at all?

-Because that is my only skill.

-I suspect not.

I suspect that's quite a niche market.

Can you speak conversational French?

-Non.

-A little bit of German?

-Nein.

-Rudiments of Italian?

There's not even... Ciao? I don't know. No.

-Piano?

-No.

-Drawing?

-No.

Do you have a mild and pleasing disposition?

-I could fake one long enough to get a job, I think.

-Good.

I think that's the thing that really matters.

I mean, if you look at these ads,

a lot of them, apart from all the rudimentary Latin

and the advanced Italian, they always stress mild and pleasing.

Mothers seem to have a real terror that they are going to let in

a governess to the house who's going to be very strict with the children.

I was going to ask you about this, because reading the first

section of Agnes Grey, it will almost give you a stroke.

It's so awful, because she's got no power.

The parents basically forbid her to punish the children.

Is this standard practice?

Well, it certainly was what Anne Bronte found

when she went to work for the Ingham family,

who are widely supposed to be the models for the Bloomfields.

She was told, "No, if they play up, come and see me."

But she tried a couple of times, whereupon Mrs Bloomfield said,

"I'm sorry, they are delightful. They are delightful."

"While receiving my instructions, they would lounge upon the sofa, lie

"on the rug, stretch, yawn, talk to each other

"or look out of the window.

"Whereas I could not so much as stir the fire or pick up

"the handkerchief I had dropped without being rebuked for inattention.

"Or told that, 'Mamma would not like me to be so careless.'"

There's a fascinating moment, actually,

in Anne Bronte's life where she really messed up.

One day, her charges were being so unpleasant,

so difficult, that she tied them to a table leg.

And at that point, their mother came in.

And let's just put it like this,

her services weren't required for much longer after that.

It's always that one moment, when you tie them to the chair,

-that the mother comes in.

-I know.

-Always.

What did you think when I said, "Let's try the dress on?"

I thought, "No."

But now, at the minute, I feel...

I feel very comfortable in this.

I'm very happy with this. It's sparking something deep within me.

There's not much you can do in a plain black governess' uniform

other than just go about your business.

Your legitimate, very legitimate business. And, of course,

it's just got that very un-modern feeling of

holding you in and upright. You're not here to slouch about and

be comfortable in this life, you're here to be upstanding.

I think I look oddly well in it.

Anne wrote a novel which gave a voice to the voiceless.

Governesses were supposed to be seen and not heard.

This book showed women that work outside the home was possible.

At least it was until your brother Branwell got involved.

Branwell joined Anne to be a tutor to the same family.

But had an affair with their mother.

So Anne felt she had to leave.

She and Branwell both went back to Haworth,

where Branwell proceeded to drown his sorrows in drink

and decent, hard-working Anne was out of a job.

One sister, however, was very happy to be at home - Emily.

Her brief foray working as a schoolteacher had

ended in illness, possibly a breakdown.

Back in Haworth, Emily ran the household for her father.

And as well as the normal chores of cooking and cleaning,

she had a rather unusual responsibility.

The pistol belonged to the sisters' father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte,

who kept it handy

just in case of any trouble from rioting mill workers.

It was Emily's job to discharge,

clean and reload the weapon.

Emily was the only Bronte sibling that the father instructed

in the firing of a pistol.

And I can see how she would have really loved this.

It must have provided a spark,

a moment of real excitement in an otherwise relentless day

of household tasks from morning till dusk.

Which is not to say

that the routines weren't useful to Emily's imagination as well.

I'm here in the kitchen at Parsonage,

where Emily would have made many, many loaves of bread.

Probably treating the dough a lot more roughly

than I am at the moment.

And I'm thinking about the ritual that she would have gone through,

of keeping the household running. The storylines

and the characters and the dialogue between the characters

would have been playing out in her head at exactly the same time,

so this simultaneous magic, in a way.

A lot of her drama takes place within the home.

Someone can be making bread

and somebody else can be plotting murder.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily shows us that the domestic sphere

can be as volatile and strange and, sometimes, frightening

at least in its intensity, as it can be out on the moors.

I'm going to spend the night at the Parsonage

and try to access Emily's conception of home.

I'm about to go to sleep here.

And I'm trying to be calm.

The wind has been so strong, it has literally

been wuthering around the house.

Walking past the front door, it felt as if somebody

was trying to get in. I'm trying to not think in that way.

Our first encounter with the heroine of Wuthering Heights

is with Cathy's ghost.

The child ghost scratching at the windows of a house,

longing to be let in.

There's something so shocking about the tangibility of that ghost.

And that's something that's influenced the way that

I tell stories myself.

"The intense horror of nightmare came over me.

"I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it.

"A most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in, let me in.'"

CHURCH BELL CHIMES

It's about 7am.

I had a really strange night.

I don't think I really slept.

I felt like I was seeing things, but even now,

if you asked me what I was seeing, I couldn't tell you.

I know Emily in particular, as Charlotte writes, was very,

very reluctant to leave this life.

Which might have been part of the reason why I was nervous before.

Because I thought she might want to stick around the house.

Even in the next life.

And you know her characters in Wuthering Heights reject heaven.

They would rather stay here.

One of the most rebellious figures in Wuthering Heights is Heathcliff.

He's full of violence and anger.

But then there's this great bond and a great love between him and Cathy

that really he's helpless before.

Top Withens is said to be one of the inspirations for

Wuthering Heights and the house where Heathcliff lives in the story.

So there's something really atmospheric and suitably Gothic

about meeting a fellow Heathcliff fan in this ruined farmhouse.

I read Wuthering Heights when I must have been 16 or 17.

I was besotted with Heathcliff.

And I've never really got over it.

Is Heathcliff a villain or something more interesting?

In the narrative descriptions of Heathcliff, there's something to

suggest that he may not even be human, but he's a fiend, a devil.

He operates on a different level to many of the characters in the novel.

It's his nature, in the way that it's the nature of the moors to

destroy you if you're lost out here after dark.

Yeah, absolutely.

Once you read between the lines, I think we can see Frankenstein.

If we look at what happens to Frankenstein's creature,

He's neglected by his creator and eventually,

he takes his revenge on mankind.

Heathcliff does something very similar.

He's neglected and abused. And, ultimately,

he exacts his revenge.

"I have no pity. I have no pity."

"The more the worms writhe,

"the more I yearn to crush out their entrails.

"It is a moral teething

"and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain."

I think what Emily Bronte does wonderfully is,

in the midst of all this, he remains the novel's romantic lead.

It's so contradictory, but it works so well.

And he's just driven by this passion for Catherine

and this desire for revenge.

Cathy seems to be the only other character in the novel who

understands Heathcliff.

There is the declaration she makes when she says, "I am Heathcliff."

And they are one character broken into two separate bodies

and they spend the story trying to come back together.

One of the most wonderful things of the book,

and culminates in the bodies decomposing together,

because he's removed the sides of the coffins.

So she literally becomes Heathcliff.

By importing exotic Gothic elements

into an everyday Yorkshire setting, Emily broke new ground,

transforming the familiar into somewhere timeless and strange.

However, Charlotte, like Anne, drew on her experiences

of the real world.

Which had taken her even further afield than England.

Charlotte was desperate to escape the confines of home.

She argued that she needed to learn French

in order to set up her own school.

So she came here, to Brussels, in 1842.

Really, it was the pretext for an adventure.

She didn't realise that this journey would change her life.

When I normally come to Brussels it's for an EU summit.

Not exactly the most exotic of occasions.

But for Charlotte, this city was hugely romantic -

a world away from the Parsonage in Haworth.

She came to live at the Pensionnat Heger.

She lived in the same house as her professor,

who she described at first as an insane tom cat.

A delirious hyena.

To begin with, Charlotte and Constantin Heger clashed,

sparring with one another in lessons.

He knew she had talent and encouraged her writing.

Charlotte had never received this kind of attention from such

a cultured and educated man before.

Her reaction was perhaps predictable, but catastrophic.

She found herself falling in love with her married professor.

Her intense feelings scared Charlotte so much

that she was driven to come to this cathedral.

"I actually did confess a real confession."

That's what Charlotte wrote to Emily.

She had to press the priest to hear her.

After all, she wasn't a Catholic herself.

What was it that she was so desperate for him to hear?

Well, she was unhappily in love with a married man

and had nobody really to talk to.

So perhaps this was the only way that she could unburden herself

of those guilty feelings.

I'm curious to find out more about Monsieur Heger

and why Charlotte became so infatuated with him.

I'm going to meet Francois Fierens...

-Bonjour.

-Hello.

-Ravie de vous recontrer.

-Oui, moi aussi.

..Monsieur Heger's great-great-great-grandson.

There is a famous family portrait here.

You can see he's got quite passionate eyes.

-I have other portraits of him here.

-Oh, this is him in later life?

-Yes.

-Oh, yes. I can see there.

-Even later.

-Oh, I like that.

-You can see a sense of humour there.

-Yes, exactly, exactly.

Yes, he's glinting at the camera in quite a mischievous way.

Clever smiling. He had a lot of humour.

So do you think that he had quite a profound effect

on the way she went on to write her novels?

Charlotte believed in the genius of the artist.

And Constantin Heger was more focused on the work to do.

-The technique.

-Yes, yes.

He was very strict about her technique.

-And told her to discard what wasn't necessary.

-Yes.

I can show you here the homework of Charlotte.

SHE GASPS

So this is actually written by Charlotte Bronte?

-Yes, yes.

-How wonderful.

You can see this was

corrected by Constantin Heger.

Is he correcting just the French

or actually the writing style as well?

The writing style, the expression.

The pupils were expected to participate themselves,

actively, in their own education.

It was not just to receive information,

by developing their own and personal views.

-He provoked something very passionate, didn't he?

-Yes.

So what do you think really went on between the pair of them?

Constantin Heger was very happy in his family life.

Charlotte was rather isolated, not very connected

with the other teachers of the school, and rather alone.

So Charlotte went back home to live in England

and then all these letters started, didn't they?

These outpourings of very passionate letters.

"Day and night, I find neither rest nor peace.

"If I sleep, I have tormented dreams in which I see you.

"Always severe, always grave and angry with me."

What do you think happened when they arrived in Brussels?

What would that have meant to Monsieur Heger?

I don't know. Frankly, I don't know.

He answered the first letters once or maybe twice.

And thereafter, his reaction was not to answer after,

because the letters became so exaggerated, passionate.

He probably considered that the best thing to do was not to answer.

"Your last letter has sustained me, has nourished me, for six months.

"Now I need another and you will give it to me."

Charlotte was so obsessed by her one-sided love affair

with Monsieur Heger that it became the focus of her first novel,

which wasn't Jane Eyre - it was called The Professor.

Charlotte wrote it in the male first-person,

the voice of the Professor himself, who eventually falls in love

with the shy, plain, but good-hearted pupil.

Sound familiar?

It was, of course, a consoling fantasy for Charlotte

in the face of all her unanswered letters.

By spring 1846, the sisters were putting the finishing touches

to their novels.

The flurry of nightly activity around the dining-room table

produced three books in less than six months.

Agnes Grey...

Wuthering Heights...

and The Professor.

Charlotte was already sounding out potential publishers.

In deference to Emily's wish for privacy,

the sisters adopted pseudonyms.

The Brontes became Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell,

concealing their identities

and even their gender from the publishers.

After several rejections, the Brontes had a breakthrough.

Or, at least Emily and Anne did.

In 1847, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey

were accepted for publication together in one volume.

But Charlotte's The Professor was rejected everywhere.

Well, here they are, and it must have been such a moment

when they arrived.

Here, actually, isn't it? Here at the Parsonage.

And here's Wuthering Heights.

Could you just check that Agnes Grey is in the back of that?

I'll have a look in my own good time.

So, poor Charlotte, she sent off the books for publication.

Yeah, she should still be waiting.

Exactly, she had to wait.

Can you imagine?

Emily's book and Anne's book were accepted by the publishers,

but hers was rejected and she'd been the one who'd pushed

the publishing idea, she'd been the one so certain that her writing

would be loved by the world and then to have the two YOUNGER sisters...

I also feel so sorry for her because all the first novels

are sort of cri de coeur, aren't they?

You know, Wuthering Heights is just something Emily

-had to get out of her. It's her thing.

-Yeah.

You've got Agnes Grey,

which is therapy for Anne getting rid of all these children

she had to look after,

and The Professor, of course, is Charlotte's poor, beaten,

broken heart over Monsieur Heger.

And it gets rejected, whereas the others get...

I actually... I actually think the problem with The Professor

was the wish fulfilment, though.

-Cos you have it written as if...

-Too much.

She writes it as if she was

her professor who had fallen in love with her

and everything works out fine.

It seems like something she had to take time on

and transform those same feelings and transport them

into Jane Eyre, in a sense.

She just needed more time.

Although, I don't think The Professor is quite as bad

as everybody makes it out to be.

I really don't.

-Really?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Make your case.

OK, all right, I'll make my case.

I think one of the things that people underestimate

with Charlotte Bronte is her quite...sort of waspish humour,

and she's so bitchy about the pupils in the school.

I mean, that's very... kind of heartfelt.

I tell you what, I do admire Charlotte for...

..after The Professor's been rejected, still ploughing on,

and the mere fact of continuing once

you've had your first book rejected.

I mean, when I get even a piece rejected or marked heavily,

I'm just destroyed for a week.

You know, I don't think she was the kind of person

who was deterred by things.

She had such determination of spirit.

Charlotte had already been working on a second novel.

As if realising that she was capable of much more than The Professor,

she'd gone back to the drawing board,

creating this time a female protagonist, Jane Eyre,

with a richly detailed biography that had drawn Charlotte's own life,

including her schooldays...

All are equally guilty before the most high!

..her experience as a governess

and, inevitably,

her love for an older man with an inconvenient wife.

And crucially, Charlotte declared that her heroine

would be "as plain and as small as myself."

Charlotte was just four foot, 11 inches tall.

I've been given the rare chance to examine an extraordinary

and very personal object.

Will it shed more light on Charlotte's self-image?

We've got a real treasure here.

It's Charlotte Bronte's corset.

And not one that I think Charlotte would have been very pleased

for us to have on display.

I think, rightly, there's the feeling that it's a very

intimate garment that shouldn't just be, you know, thrown about.

What do you think it tells us about Charlotte?

Well, I think in terms of the physicality of the piece,

it shows us that she was very, very small

because I think you can see how tiny she was.

And we think around a UK size two,

which, if you think about it, is very, very small.

-I mean, that's like a child.

-It is like a child.

And certainly when it was tightly laced,

which we know Charlotte did tightly lace,

it would have had about an 18.5 inch waist.

If we just lift it up...

Why would somebody who was so slight be corseting themselves anyway?

Perhaps she felt the need to keep herself in,

to have a sense of control.

And it's quite a punitive piece, in some senses.

You look at this and you can just see you've got a big, iron busk up the front.

It's quite a harsh corset. There's no give. If you'd had wood or ivory,

as your body warmed up, it would have given you a

little bit more movement, but iron is unyielding.

It is one of the very striking things about Jane Eyre, isn't it?

This small, slight, plain individual,

but with such a force of personality, such an inner strength.

I think that's so true and I think the corset speaks to me

of that actually in Charlotte as well

because one of the reasons, perhaps, Charlotte felt the need to be

so tightly laced is because there was this inner fire within her,

that she was perhaps afraid would come out.

Charlotte now had a heroine whom she could write about

with supreme insight and empathy.

But she needed a compelling male figure to match Jane,

a romantic interest who wasn't simply

a fictionalised Monsieur Heger.

Once again, Charlotte turned to her life for inspiration.

But this time, she drew on the most immediate crisis

that the sisters faced.

Their father, Patrick Bronte, was now practically blind.

Surgery on his cataracts was extremely risky,

but Patrick was desperate.

In July 1846, he and Charlotte travelled to Manchester.

There, the cataracts were literally cut out of Patrick's eyes...

without anaesthetic.

Meanwhile, Charlotte sat by his bedside, writing away.

So during this fraught time when she was so worried about her father,

and actually was suffering from raging toothache herself -

which kept her up at night - what did Charlotte do?

She writes the character of Mr Rochester,

blinded in the fire and then regaining his sight.

It's almost as if it was a form of wish fulfilment.

Charlotte added a whole new dimension to

Rochester's character and to the novel.

Patrick's operation was a success, and just six weeks later,

he was back home at the Parsonage,

where Charlotte finished Jane Eyre.

She sent off the novel to a small London publishing house.

They snapped it up.

Jane Eyre by Currer Bell -

Charlotte's pseudonym - came off the press on 19th October 1847.

By Christmas, it, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey

were all on sale at bookshops like this in London

and throughout the country.

We've come here to learn more about the huge and immediate impact

made by the Brontes, or rather, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

It must have been so strange for them,

having written it all in their enclosed little world

in the Parsonage and then suddenly having strangers

perusing their work and making judgements.

A review of Agnes Grey said, "Oh, Acton Bell must have bribed

"a governess with either money or love

"to have got such detail of her prison from her."

Or, or...

Just stay with me here. Think horses, not zebras.

It could have been a woman, but no, no.

There was one I liked, which was actually by a woman reviewer,

and she said about Jane Eyre that,

"If it wasn't written by a man then it must have been written

"by a sexual delinquent."

But I mean, I suppose for the time, there were shocking elements in it.

I mean, Rochester wants to make Jane Eyre his mistress

and set her up in what sounds a rather nice house

-in the south of France.

-Martha!

I'm not sure I'd have run away, but anyway.

I think this review sort of sums up what it was

that people found so distasteful.

It says, "They, the Bells, do not turn away from dwelling upon

"those physical acts of cruelty which true taste rejects."

It's as if they're saying, "Leave those skeletons in the closet.

"Don't bring them into nice people's homes."

That's the thing - up till now, the novel's been

a very middle class, kind of genteel pastime and form,

and all of a sudden, the Brontes come along and say,

"Actually, you could do this with it as well."

I mean, that's a genie out of the bottle, isn't it?

By modern standards, we could end the Bronte sisters' story here

and it would be a happy ending.

But at a time when women's economic situations were precarious

and death always seemed just around the corner,

a happy ending for the Brontes meant two things -

marriage and survival.

We've returned to Haworth for a one-off event -

a re-enacment of the only Bronte sibling wedding,

a bittersweet occasion for the family.

Less than a year after his sister's great success,

Branwell had collapsed and died in an alcohol-induced fit.

He'd drawn this prophetic image not long before.

Then at his funeral, just weeks later,

Emily developed tuberculosis.

She died three months after Branwell.

Anne's death, also from tuberculosis,

came the following year.

In barely eight months, Charlotte had lost

all of her surviving siblings.

She sought comfort with someone who'd always been there

in the background, someone who'd long been quietly devoted to her -

her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls.

But their wedding would take place without any of Charlotte's family

being present.

The match had initially been opposed by her father, Patrick,

who worried that Arthur was after Charlotte's money.

On the eve of the wedding, the Reverend Bronte

decided he wasn't up to giving Charlotte away.

So the wedding went ahead without him.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God

to join together this man and this woman

in holy matrimony.

I suppose what I've learnt from the time that we've spent up here

in Haworth Parsonage and looking at their lives is that

even though, physically, she's so frail and so tiny

and so insecure about her own appearance,

inside there was an extraordinary, powerful,

strong personality

that dominated her sisters

and pushed towards publications of the books

and towards one of the greatest books written

in the English language.

To have and to hold from this day forward...

..for better, for worse...

for richer, for poorer...

in sickness and in health...

to love and to cherish...

I think coming here, I sort of expected to find

a boundary or gateway between their hometown

and the worlds that each of the three sisters stepped off into.

Actually, they've become more mysterious to me

in a lot of ways, because you can only follow them

up to a certain point.

I will.

The amazing thing about all three of them is that they've got

these quite frail bodies that, obviously,

give up on them too early.

But they're housing these indomitable wills

and extraordinary talents.

It's such a dichotomy.

It breeds the myth.

BELLS RING

CHEERING