Journal

she had longed for and imagined in her writings, but her letters demonstrate
genuine happiness during the all-too brief period of her married life. In less
than a year after the wedding, at the age of 38, she died of complications in
the early stages of pregnancy.
Her first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, a deeply Christian woman herself,
who had known Charlotte in the last years of her life, marvelled at her quiet
survival of a life of trial and tribulation: ‘the wonder to me is how she can
have kept heart and power alive in her life of desolation’. 12 Gaskell portrayed
her subject as a long-suffering daughter whose tragic life had been directed by
duty and stoicism. I believe that Charlotte Brontë’s heroic survival of such a
tough pilgrimage through life was the result of her strong religious faith,
however unorthodox. I think we can say, in conclusion, that her personal
commitment to ‘the world-redeeming creed of Christ’ meant that she
believed that Christ would never finally abandon a creature he had made in
his own image, that she would eventually find justice in the next world if not
in this world, and that meanwhile it was her duty to exercise her strong
creative encouragement of her fellow human beings.
Notes:
1 This talk was first delivered at St John’s Church, Canberra, in October 2008.
2 T. Wemyss Reid, Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph (London: Macmillan and Co., 1877), pp. 24-6.
3 Psalm 23: often quoted by Charlotte Brontë, e.g. Jane Eyre, ch. 37.
4 The Letters of Charlotte Brontë with a selection of letters by family and friends, ed. Margaret Smith,
vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 343.
5 He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1807 and, after several curacies, was appointed
Perpetual Curate of Haworth in 1820.
6 Christine Alexander, “Charlotte Brontë at Roe Head”, Norton Critical Edition: Charlotte Brontë,
‘Jane Eyre’, 3rd edition. ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York and London: 2001, p. 407.
7 Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983),
pp. 142, 144.
8 Alexander, “Charlotte Brontë at Roe Head”, p. 403.
9 Alexander, Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, p. 141.
10 Smith (ed), Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 144. As punishment for offending the gods,
Tantalus was plunged into a river up to his chin and tortured with insatiable thirst. Whenever
he tried to drink, the river receded; and so he was continually “tantalized” and continually
disappointed.
11 Smith (ed), Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, pp. 166-8.
12 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple & Arthur Pollard
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1966), pp. 10-12.
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