balmy sleep

Anne Brontë, aged about 13 (drawing by a 17-year-old Charlotte in 1833)

[Image source: http://kleurrijkbrontesisters.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/anne-bronte-william-weightman.html]




More info on portraits of Anne: http://www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/ann5face.html . There are none of her as an adult.






No hope, no pleasure can I find;
I am grown weary of my mind;
Often in balmy sleep I try
To gain a rest from misery,


And in one hour of calm repose
To find a respite from my woes;
But dreamless sleep is not for me
And I am still in misery.


(from Anne Brontë, "A Voice from the Dungeon")


The Gondal speaker is a certain Marina Sabia, otherwise unknown.


This exemplifies what makes us warm to Anne, an eighteenth-century (say, Cowperian) firmness of diction, a penetrating insight, a bold straightforwardness of statement,  and all this completely without ego (unlike both her sisters).


The repeat of the word "misery" at the end of successive stanzas, but varied by being made to rhyme with different vowel-sounds, actually recalls to me a mid-sixteenth-century music, maybe Wyatt.


I tried to look up the rhetorical device that Anne uses when she says "balmy sleep", but I failed to find it.  "Balmy" applies to sleep as it ought to be - as it is in books - but clearly not as it's experienced by Marina, whose dreams are terrible, turmoiled things. Even the happy dream of her child and her child's father goes wrong, in the space of a single stanza:


I thought he smiled and spoke to me,
But still in silent ecstasy
I gazed at him, I could not speak;
I uttered one long piercing shriek. ...

the guardian moon and her comrade star

Crescent moon with Venus at evening

[Image source: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246243/what-do-you-call-the-star-that-appears-before-night-evening]


I recently wrote a post about Emily Brontë's earliest dated poem. 


http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/early-poems-by-emily-bronte.html


Here's the poem again:


Cold clear and blue the morning heaven
Expands its arch on high
Cold clear and blue Lake Werna's water
Reflects that winter's sky
The moon has set but Venus shines
A silent silvery star


(In or before July 1836, age 17)


I've been reading Emily's complete poems in chronological order of composition, and now I've reached the other end of her output, some ten years later on. And suddenly there comes a flicker of memory of that early poem:


M.A. Written on the Dungeon Wall - N. C.


I know that tonight, the wind is sighing,
The soft August wind, over forest and moor
While I in a grave-like chill am lying
On the damp black flags of my dungeon-floor --


I know that the Harvest Moon is shining;
She neither will wax nor wane for me.
Yet I weary, weary, with vain repining,
One gleam of her heaven-bright face to see!


For this constant darkness is wasting the gladness
Fast wasting the gladness of life away;
It gathers up thoughts akin to madness
That never would cloud the world of day


I chide with my soul -- I bid it cherish
The feelings it lived on when I was free,
But shrinking it murmurs, 'Let Memory perish
Forget for thy Friends have forgotten thee!'


Alas, I did think that they were weeping
Such tears as I weep -- it is not so!
Their careless young eyes are closed in sleeping;
Their brows are unshadowed, undimmed by woe --


Might I go to their beds, I'd rouse that slumber,
My spirit should startle their rest, and tell
How hour after hour, I wakefully number
Deep buried from light in my lonely cell!


Yet let them dream on, though dreary dreaming
Would haunt my pillow if they were here
And I were laid warmly under the gleaming
Of that guardian moon and her comrade star --


Better that I my own fate mourning
Should pine alone in the prison-gloom
Than waken free on the summer morning
And feel they were suffering this awful doom




[No. 164 in Janet Regazi's edition, dated August 1845.]


* M.A. is a Gondal character, not known from other sources. N.C. : the Northern College. This was indeed a college, where children of the Gondal nobility were educated. But in the Gondal world every building has its dungeon.


Both Emily and Anne wrote "dungeon wall" poems. And in fact Anne's dungeon wall poem of 16 Dec 1844 "Though not a breath can enter here" had introduced the motifs of sensory exclusion and of being neglected by the free world.  Emily's poem meditates further on that. It passes to and fro between the captive's evocation of luminous late summer evenings and the absolute exclusion of those luminous evenings from the captive's present dungeon.


And a drastic choice looms. Since the captive's fate is forgotten by the people above, shouldn't the captive forget the world above? That is to say, forget her/his own memories? That impulse comes from within and we see it's driven by despair and disappointment but also by self-preservation. It's the residual connection with that other life, now thinned to memory, that is torturing.




It was written only a few weeks before "The Prisoner". Self-pity is explicit in this sketchy lyric, while the heroine of "The Prisoner" conspicuously defies self-pity and she mentions no friends upon this earth;  nevertheless, her pitifulness does seem to be an understood thing.




Anyway, "that guardian moon and her comrade star" means the moon and Venus.  The two have been linked since very early times.  As the brightest objects in the night sky, they often seem to have the sky to themselves, particularly during a misty twilight when fainter objects can't be seen. They sometimes appear quite close together: a waxing crescent with the evening star after sunset (as in the photo above), or a waning crescent with the morning star near dawn.  A fairly close conjunction takes place around 8 times a year (about half of them during hours of darkness)






[As on the well-known crescent-and-star symbol on many flags. This is often mistakenly identified with Islam, but Islamic thought deplores visual images, especially for the divine. The crescent-and-star was an emblem of the Ottoman Empire; its origins are pre-Islamic.]


Emily's poems usually speak rapturously of the heavens, and especially of these two comrades. In the sensation-starved and solitary life of Haworth, their appearance in a window was something that mattered. She saw them as nurturers and comforters.

Note for "Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights" - the lost writings

[Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1992 movie).]

 I probably will write a post about Wuthering Heights one day. But for the moment:

It's always nice to recommend on-line material,  and I think the following is a terrific collection of biographical and critical ideas by Clare B. Dunkle (arising from her researches for a prequel to Wuthering Heights)

http://www.claredunkle.com/Design/maidsbrmaster.htm

She writes about the question of Emily's hypothetical second novel here:

http://www.claredunkle.com/Design/maidsbrmyths.htm#interpreter

Did it exist? 

Emily could have had more than two years for writing a second novel - i.e. from the time that Wuthering Heights was first packed off to publishers (July 1846?)  up to when she became ill on October 1st, 1848 (at Branwell's funeral).


[Can I complain here that Brontë chronologies on the web are incredibly inconsistent? Some say that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights between October 1845 and June 1846, some say it was written from December 1845 to July 1846, others again say it was probably begun in August 1845. Beware how your casual guesswork develops immortality! Again, some say that the agreement with Newby to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey was in July 1847, others say August 1847 - this I'd have thought was a matter of record. Bloom's Notes* clearly states that it was on  July 15th that the sisters agreed to Newby's proposal that they bear part of the production costs.]

Juliet Barker says that Emily and Anne at first reacted to the many rejections of their first novels by retreating into the privacy of Gondal. She thinks both Tenant and Emily's possible second novel were begun around mid-1847. In The Brontës she says (re the coming year - 1848): "there was much to look forward to... Emily and Anne had got their first books in print and were both working on a second novel..."

Dear Sir,--

I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your next work. If it be an improvement on your first you will have established yourself as a first-rate novelist, but if it falls short the critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be at your own time.

Believe me, my dear Sir,
yrs. sincerely,
T.C. Newby

Feb. 15, 1848

Thomas Newby's letter of Feb 15th 1848 implies that Emily had definitely begun a second novel but not yet completed it. Of course Emily was under no compulsion to tell him the whole truth, she might in fact have practically finished it, or again, she might still have been only projecting it. The only thing that seems definite is she told him there was going to be a second novel. (The rascally Newby seems to me to give quite good advice.)

The letter has no addressee name on it, and it isn't absolutely conclusive that the letter IS addressed to Ellis Bell rather than Acton Bell. (It would of course make perfect sense if it was addressed to Anne, then midway through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.) However, the letter was found in Emily's writing desk. Among other things in this desk there was also an empty envelope from Newby that is addressed to Ellis Bell. The letter and the envelope were separate, but the folding of the letter is consistent with it having arrived in this envelope.

Emily's last dated poem was Sept 14, 1846. So basically there is no known creative work from the last two years of Emily's active life.

According to Bloom's Notes* there is a conjecture that Emily spent some of her last years writing an "expanded version of Wuthering Heights", which of course does not survive. I have no idea of the source of this conjecture.

Charlotte could (as Clare says) have destroyed the putative second novel out of concern for Emily's reputation. "All the evidence suggests it," though, is too strong. It's also entirely possible that Emily ordered its destruction herself. We know she was a perfectionist and we know she had sensitivities about things being published without her control. Also, if Emily did order its destruction then  it might have been Anne she asked, rather than Charlotte. It's all speculation. (Margaret Lane, The Bronte Story, 1953. - quoted here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/198483-was-emily-bronte-working-on-a-second-novel). 

If Charlotte did have any involvement in destroying Emily's last work then that would cast a certain irony on her words in the Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights. 

If the auditor of her work when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects, it was not amenable.  

(By the way, isn't it fascinating to think of Emily reading Wuthering Heights aloud to her sisters?)

Anyway,  Charlotte attributes the shocking aspects of Wuthering Heights to immaturity and claims Emily's writing would have mellowed had she lived. That claim of course does not fit in very well with the hypothesis that Charlotte had to destroy a second novel for being even more shocking than the first.

[This has become, for many, a matter of fact rather than speculation:

We'll never know how Brilliant Emily's next novel was, because her sister, Charlotte, destroyed it.
I believe one theory is that Charlotte was trying to protect Emily's posthumous reputation - the implication being that the second novel might have been even more transgressive than the first.

(Comments by BMacLean in a Guardian comments stream.) ]


I am inclined to believe in Charlotte's good faith here. I think that Emily's second novel never existed or never got very far (or if it did, Charlotte didn't know anything about it).

The disappearance of the Gondal prose writings is almost more painful still, because we know more about them. It's certainly possible that Charlotte destroyed them after the death of her two sisters, though I don't know if she would necessarily have thought them in any danger of being published. It's also possible that Emily and Anne took the decision to destroy them. After all that's the most common fate of adolescent writings - their authors get rid of them.

So I think the claim "Again, almost certainly, Charlotte disposed of them when she went through her sisters' papers" is overstated. Clare infers Charlotte' attitude from some minor edits (e.g. of poems and WH) and her public judgments of her sisters' work, which seem to many so distressingly lukewarm. But I don't know what evidence there may be that Charlotte did do any actual destroying. What I do know is that she didn't destroy the Angria work that she wrote with Branwell, though she might quite reasonably have thought of it as prejudicial to her own and her brother's reputation, if she was the kind of tender-minded tidy-upper who would worry about the Gondal writings. Who knows, maybe Charlotte was the family member who was least exacting when it came to tidying up papers? Against this, of course, you could argue that Charlotte might have been too ill to deal with her own juvenile work in the same way she had allegedly dealt with Emily's and Anne's.

As Ian Jack pointed out, Emily's sole literary remains consisted of Wuthering Heights and the poems, three letters and some remarks or opinions conveyed by family and acquaintances.

Coming back to the other side again, Charlotte re-edited Wuthering Heights in 1850, and though she made unauthorized changes to paragraphing and to the rendering of Joseph's dialect, her main intention was to put right the many errors in Newby's edition (Newby having ignored Emily's list of corrections). Was this evident care for her sister's work compatible with obliterating the bulk of her other writings? Perhaps. "'Wildfell Hall' it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve." There's a sinister ring to that remark. Suppression, though in this case impracticable, was apparently something Charlotte viewed without qualms.

Perhaps as a result of proprietorial remarks like that, we tend to assume Charlotte the famous novelist would naturally feel that she had control over the manuscripts left behind by her sisters. That may be right, but it is rather a big assumption. The unquestioned head of the family and the inheritor of Emily's and Anne's manuscripts would of course be her father, Patrick Brontë. (Charlotte's manuscripts, on the other hand, became the property of her husband, who published The Professor.) So perhaps it was Patrick who destroyed the Gondal prose and Emily's "second novel"; or again, he might have acted in collusion with Charlotte while she was still alive. There are doubtless facts here of which I'm ignorant.

We need to remember that we don't know. It's always tempting to put well-known individuals into the frame, just as anti-Stratfordians always imagine a nobleman must have written Shakespeare's plays, in line with Scott's observation :   "..vulgar fame, which is always disposed to ascribe remarkable actions to a remarkable name..." (1830 Introduction to A Legend of Montrose). But Emily's and Anne's papers could have disappeared or been destroyed without Charlotte's involvement, especially after Charlotte's death. Persons responsible unknown.

* Harold Bloom, ed. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Notes), 1996. I found this online, but I can't track it down again.

anne brunty

Reading Anne Brunty's Agnes Grey last night, because I couldn't sleep, and a chap from Nidderdale - I'll fill in the name when I get home* - complaining about Charlotte's undervaluation of both her younger sisters' writings. Which certainly is striking, and painful. Does anyone accuse Charlotte of having destroyed the Gondal writings? I feel almost certain of it - until I speculate that Emily, sufficiently rattled by Charlotte's publication of her Gondal poems, might on her deathbed have asked Anne to get rid of the rest. But he tells us as a certainty that at any rate Charlotte did destroy the manuscripts of their published novels, so I suppose that is authoritative, though I don't know on whose authority.

[Brontë - I know, they changed the last name like u creatively re-spell a first name today, Erykah. But "Brontë" is difficult to type into Blogger when you're in a rush.]

*[Arnold Craig Bell. An enthusiast from outside the universities, he lived in Nidderdale at Folly Lodge. Between 1950 and 1992 he wrote studies of Alexandre Dumas, Handel, the songs of Schubert, as well as Anne Brontë.. -- all published by small presses, e.g. Merlin Press in this case. Also several volumes of poetry, which were published by Outposts.]

Writing about Anne Brontë is almost inavariably about REPUTATION, because of her unusual situation, for a novelist, of being always damagingly compared with two more famous sisters. Not that you find many people explicitly stating that Anne is a lesser author than the other two. That is, as it were, a judgement that doesn't need to be spelled out. I suppose it is a judgement secretly felt - and thus made - even by those very people who are very fierce in her defence. Bell writes about reputation for pages. The Internet, as regards authors, is always boringly obsessed with this theme. I am thoroughly weary with hearing about George Moore. Subtract that theme from writing about Anne Brontë, and what else are you left with? That Agnes Grey is a powerful statement about governesses. That The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful statement about debauched behaviour and a wife's right to escape it. All this is true, but it's not very exciting or original. I should want to say something else, but I too feel the blankness, the - What to do with this text? What to do with this babied Anne, whom we must refer to by her first name?

Yet, after all, when we entered the lofty iron gateway, when we drove softly up the smooth, well-rolled carriage road, with the green lawn on each side, studded with young trees, and approached the new but stately mansion of Wellwood, rising above its mushroom poplar-groves, my heart failed me, and I wished it were a mile or two farther off.

(Chapter II)

This is Agnes, aged 18, arriving at the Bloomfields. "Wellwood" is one of those names that might in earlier fiction promise a Jonsonian image of abundance and moral strength. Here the symbolism is replaced by realism. Of course they would give it a nice name; they have a nice name themselves. "Lofty" and "stately" are staples of idealistic description, words later used in tourist literature. But somewhat complicating this is the daylight clarity of the estate's newness; those studded beginnings of a park, and the "mushroom poplar-groves". The adjective refers not to shape - these might well be Lombardy Poplars, widely planted after 1800 - but connotes "sprung up in a night" (poplars being all fast-growing trees).

Agnes' feelings are, naturally, aroused from the weary journey into active fear at the thought of meeting strangers and having to rely on unaided powers as never before. But this sentence also describes the dwindling of fancy into fact - not alarming fact, but specific, and different from what could have been imagined.

Her thoughts on education are about to be severely shaken up.

Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task: the clear remembrance of my own thoughts in early childhood would be a surer guide than the instructions of the most mature adviser. I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections...

(Chapter I)

Ideas beloved of authors and romantic poets, ideas supposed adequate, still, by most parents. In a family, buttressed by instinct, affection, and the child's utter dependence, they work out all right, a lot of the time. Agnes did not go to school herself, she was taught within the family. But now she is to find that the governess's role places her in the family but emphatically not of it. She is repulsed by these children, and all thought of identifying them with her own younger self is immediately blown away.

Relativism values All literature, in a way that is supposed to be unsustainable, like an economy with roaring inflation. Every instance of destroyed literature is thus equally regrettable, whether it's Anne's 4-volume Henry Sophona sensation or Byron's diary or the business papers drafts and junk emails that we destroy every day. In principle.

But ignoring those, what we might well excuse to ourselves on the basis that their composers probably have copies, and ignoring also our own writings, which we may feel are a special case that we are allowed to destroy without compunction - perhaps even meritoriously - we do sometimes end up being the sole possessor of papers with a little more relevance to the Gondal analogy - dead and not widely-remembered creative people who sometimes wrote things that looked like poetry. Sometimes I glance at those papers (e.g. when moving house) and I think, no-one cares whether this exists or not.

Or our children's drawings, how many boxes of them will we hang on to?

Selection is everywhere, tidily scissoring and sometimes leaving a bleeding lobe.