Seduction and Betrayal Read Online Free PDF Page A

death for Emily also. She had, according to all reports, been healthy, but she never went out again after Branwell’s funeral and three months later she herself was dead. During the interval she spoke hardly at all, would not give consideration to her failing body. Charlotte was appalled by “the great emaciation, her breathlessness after any movement, her racing pulse...her exhausting cough.” Emily refused medical care, yielding only to Charlotte’s frenzy of fear on the last day. When the doctor finally arrived she was dead.
    Charlotte’s account of Emily’s death is intensely moving:
    Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate.... Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted.... Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything.
    There may have been a suicidal feeling in Emily’s essential nature. In her poems and in her novel, death appears more perfect than life; it stands ahead as the ultimate liberty and freedom. “Thou would’st rejoice for those that live, because they live to die....”
    When Mrs. Gaskell was preparing her life of Charlotte Brontë she went to Brussels to call on the Heger family. Mme. Heger refused to see her but she spoke with M. Heger and, so it is thought, saw the love letters Charlotte had written him. She did not record either the feelings or the letters in her account of Charlotte, even though the falling in love, the extreme suffering endured because of this love were central experiences in Charlotte Brontë’s life and in her work. Perhaps Mrs. Gaskell had given her word not to reveal the contents of the letters; more likely it was her own feeling of respect for Charlotte, solicitude for the “image” that made her wish to glide over the whole thing softly and swiftly. This left room for later diggers, and the love affair gets all the attention from them that it failed to receive from Mrs. Gaskell.
    Winifred Gérin’s biography gives the fullest account we have of the years at the school in Brussels. The suppressed and then recovered letters are interesting above all as a picture of the pitiable emotional strain endured by a young, inexperienced girl in her efforts to make a life for herself. For the rest, the story of Charlotte Brontë’s letters is like some unfortunate, fantastical turn in one of her own plots. They are very earnest, agonizing documents, overheated, despairing, and intensely felt.
    The existence of the letters is itself strange. We are told that M. Heger, supposedly entirely without fault or investment in Charlotte’s passion, tore them up and threw them in the wastebasket. His wife, very brisk and firm in dispatching Charlotte when she sensed her infatuation, for some reason reclaimed the poor letters, thriftily pasted and gummed them together again. Mrs. Gérin has the odd notion that this was done for “evidence,” but it is impossible to see the need for evidence in a case always presented as unilateral — that is, a deep, passionate crush on Charlotte’s part for a man who had no interest whatsoever in her and gave her no reason to hope. In any case, in 1913 M. Heger’s son presented the documents to the British Museum.
    Charlotte and Emily Brontë went to Belgium to study French and other subjects in order to prepare themselves for their destiny as teachers. Emily stayed only one year, and when their aunt died, went home gladly in order to run the house for her father. Charlotte returned for a second year to the Pensionnat Heger, where they were studying — going this time as a teacher of English rather than as a pupil. In her decision to return, an