Journal

agony. In her poetry she yearns for her childhood dreams of heaven when
she was blindly pious, unconscious of evil; now sinful terrors plague her
mind, spectral visions foretell her death and the church tower bears down on
her spirit like an awful giant. She is afraid to pray. She speaks of the ‘ghastly
power’ and ‘grinding tyranny’ of her thoughts, fed in infancy by Wilson’s
extreme books ‘of ghostly and spectral dread’. This is the ‘dreadful doom’ of
Hypochondria, Charlotte’s word for her intense depression that she translated
so vividly into the experience of Lucy Snowe in her last novel Villette. In the
novel, Lucy feels ‘torn, racked and oppressed in mind … galled was my
inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future’ (ch. 15).
Only Charlotte’s departure from teaching and her return home to where she
was free to write about her Angrian world could resolve for now her intense
conflict between duty and creativity.
But Charlotte Brontë still had to earn a living: she tried governessing with
disastrous results and became increasingly frustrated with the enclosed
conventional life she was expected to live as a woman. Her ambition was
first to be a painter but women were barred from the Academy schools and
what little money the Brontës had was to be spent on her brother’s artistic
career, since he was expected to provide for his sisters. She then focussed on
writing and wrote to the poet laureate Robert Southey for advice. His advice
is famous (or infamous): ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life:
Hall Green Baptist Church Haworth
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