(no subject)

[meganbmoore]

"That it had faults of execution, faults of art, was obvious, but faults of intention of feeling could be suspected by none who knew the writer. For my part, I consider the subject unfortunately chosen - it was one the author was not qualified to handle at once vigorously and truthfully. The simple and natural - quiet description and simple pathos - are, I think Acton Bell's forte. I liked Agnes Grey better than the present work." 

The above is an excerpt of a letter from Charlotte Bronte to W S Williams regarding Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ("Acton Bell" is the pseudonym Anne Bronte wrote under), which I stumbled across earlier this week, as one does (I was actually looking for information about Agnes Grey). Tenant was both very popular and extremely controversial, and a year after Anne's death, it was due to be republished, but Charlotte prevented this, and did her best to keep it out of print until her own death several years later.

 

Say what you will about Charlotte Bronte's works, but she actively suppressed her own sister's work, labeling her "unqualified" to write about the issues that concerned her.

Comments

[dorothean]

That she did. I was so angry when I first learned about it -- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is one of my favorite novels ever.

Have you read Lucasta Miller's The Brontë Myth? (I read it very recently and reviewed it here if you're interested.) There's not much about Anne, but I really appreciated Miller's analysis of Charlotte's motives in trying to influence her sisters' posthumous reputations. She was keen to protect them from criticism, but she did somewhat agree with reviewers' charges of indelicacy (all the violence in Wuthering Heights, and the descriptions of alcoholism and domestic violence in Tenant -- I remember Miller quoted one reviewed who was shocked that a female author could describe what it felt like for a man to be drunk!). Charlotte's strategy was to downplay her sisters' education and attempt to argue that what they wrote came not so much from their own experiential knowledge but through Romantic-style inspirations that were visited upon innocent but artistic souls.

I don't think this was justified, of course -- and it didn't even work because then all the reviewers thought "oh well even her sister thinks this is a naughty book, so it must be!" -- so the only thing that makes me feel at all better about Charlotte in this regard is that while she was trying to fix Anne and Emily's reputations, she was also rather unhappily dealing with her own fame. People (even other novelists who should have known better) kept assuming that Jane Eyre was much more autobiographical than it actually was. This annoyed and embarrassed her so much that she tried to avoid seeming passionate or individualistic about anything in public. I think she felt that any scandals about her sisters' novels would make things harder for her, as well as being a painful attack on their beloved memory.

Er, I'm a Brontë geek, so if there's anything particular you were wondering about Agnes Grey, maybe I can help! (I actually reviewed it about a year ago, but I think I might say something slightly different in the first half now that I've read The Brontë Myth, which gave me a lot of tools for critiquing Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë.)

[meganbmoore]

I was mostly checking to see if Agnes Grey was the book I thought it was. i'm about 10 pages into it.

LOVED Tenant, also really liked the miniseries with Tara Fitzgerald.

[shiegra]

....dang, what an asshole.

[meganbmoore]

The "realistic" bit is what gets to me. Especially given her own most famous work.

[shiegra]

It's just so reminiscent in tone (or rather, an early example) of the patronizing kind of criticism that's not even criticism so much as a dismissal, leaving no room for objection or dissenting opinion. You kind of get the sense if you did present a differing opinion you'd just be ignored, or at best get a condescending smile or shake of the head. Like, the words of the criticism themselves (in my experience) aren't even important or pointed so much as for their silencing purpose. It drives me up the wall in real life.