Journal

There are many approaches I could take to the topic of Charlotte Brontë’s
Christianity and many questions we could ask about the nature of her belief. I
have chosen to focus on the image of pilgrimage, since it became such an
important aspect of her creativity and thought, and provides, I think, a clue to
her attitude to Christianity and her strong hold on life. Her letters suggest that
she saw her own life as one of pilgrimage—more frequently through ‘the
valley of the shadow of death’ than beside ‘quiet pastures’. 3 Her early writings
or juvenilia make frequent references to The Pilgrim’s Progress and to Biblical
motifs of journey through the wilderness; and the narratives of her mature
works are structured as personal pilgrimages, in particular her most famous
novel Jane Eyre. It is not always good critical practice to interpret works of
art as indicative of the beliefs of the writer: the narrators of Brontë’s novels
are not synonymous with the author, but we know from the views in Brontë’s
letters that they are often very close and there is no doubt that her novels
encompass her religious experiences and reveal her own search for Truth and
meaning in life.
I’m going to begin by providing a brief religious background to what is often
seen as Charlotte Brontë’s unorthodox Christianity: a map of England at the
time with its conflicting creeds and the nature of home influences on the
young Charlotte Brontë. I’m then going to sketch her journey through the vale
of tears, as she saw it, focussing particularly on her religious crisis at school.
And finally, I am going to look at the way the image of pilgrimage informs
her writing, especially Jane Eyre, which is suggestively subtitled ‘An
autobiography’.
The Brontës lived at a time when religion was central to the ordering of social
and moral life in England. Charlotte was born in 1816 and died at the age of
38 in 1855, the eldest of the four surviving Bronte children (the others were
Branwell, Emily and Anne—all writers and Emily and Anne also famous
novelists).
This was a lively time for Christianity in England: the established Anglican
Church was beset on all sides by a variety of dissenter churches, from the
intellectual and prosperous Congregationalists and Unitarians (the faith of
Charlotte Brontë’s friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell) to the often
working-class Baptists or Methodists. By mid-century dissenters represented
roughly half the church-going population in England; and to them was added
a growing number of Roman Catholics, some converts but most arriving
from Ireland because of the great famine. There was also a growing number
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