THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

e your curate, if you like, but never your wife’. The serenity of the novel’s conclusion (in which Jane and the
widowed and maimed Rochester are reunited) is qualified by its final references to the sacrificial ministry of St John
Rivers in India. The novel’s last sentences enforce the co-existence of alternative duties and vocations. Jane has
chosen secular happiness as a means of salvation; as her narrative has so often demonstrated, free will and the due
exercise of a God-given conscience lie at the core of the divine scheme of things.
Shirley (1849) lacks the intensity and the compelling narrative direction of Jane Eyre. It is, in many ways, a
‘Condition of England’ novel, one which offers a bold retrospect on the Luddite agitation and machine-breaking that
had characterized the politics of the industrial North in the early 1810s. This retrospect allows for a certain distancing
and for an examination of period details and assumptions, many of them culled from the first-hand witness of the
Reverend Patrick Brontë and his acquaintance. The main interest of the story
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derives from its particularly distinctive female characters, most notably that of Shirley Keeldar (whom Elizabeth
Gaskell affirmed in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) was a ‘representation’ of Emily Brontë). Some of the local
and thematic material of The Professor was strikingly reshaped into a far finer novel, Villette (1853). Villette may
avoid touching on ‘topics of the day’ in a limited political sense, but it deals directly and often painfully with the
pressing issues of women’s choice and women’s employment. The novel’s narrator, Lucy Snowe, is an autobiographer
denied the scope, the certainties, and the happy personal resolution of Jane Eyre. She is priggish and frosty where
Jane Eyre was bold and fiery. Her English Protestant isolation, and indeed alienation, is stressed by the novel’s
unlovely, urban Belgian setting, by its frequent recourse to French dialogue and terminology, and by its variously
intrusive, inquisitive, flirtatious, and restrictive Catholic characters. Lucy’s circumstances and her hyperactive
conscience oblige her to assert her separateness and to insist on the superiority of her own personal, moral, and
professional sensibility. Her confessions, both to the reader, and, awkwardly and desperately, to a Villette priest, are
restless and self absorbed and played against an equally uneasy, not to say suspicious, background. Lucy’s growing
love for a waspish Catholic, Paul Emmanuel, ultimately allows her glimmers of real emotional happiness and
professional achievement, but the narrative ends with an Atlantic storm and a profound uncertainty as to whether her
love will ever be fulfilled.
Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey was co-published with her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights in 1847. Its first grudging
reviews were inevitably overshadowed by the often bemused notices given to Emily’s novel. All three sisters had
maintained the use of the non-specific pseudonyms they had chosen for the unsuccessful publication of the Poems, by
Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846. This very non-specificity originally gave rise to suppositions about single
authorship or of collaboration and, even since the nineteenth century, Agnes Grey has remained firmly in the shadow
of the work of Charlotte and Emily. Its governess-narrator endures loss of status, humiliation, snobbery, and insult,
but her account of herself is characterized by a calm sense of her own moral justification. It presents an impressively
harrowing picture of the restrictions on contemporary middle-class women seeking the only respectable form of paid
employment, but it lacks the fire and anger which blaze up in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Anne Brontë’s
second novel describes the events surrounding a drastically unhappy marriage and the escape from that marriage by
its heroine, Helen Graham. The story is told by means of a receding double narrative. It ends happily, but the graphic
descriptions of the alcoholic Huntingdon’s brutality provoked one early reviewer to complain of ‘coarse and
disgusting’ language and another to deplore ‘the tendency of the author to degrade passion into appetite’. To
Charlotte Brontë, acting as her sister’s literary executor, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall seemed barely ‘desirable to
preserve ... the choice of subject in that work is a mistake’. This over-protective, censorious attitude may derive from
an honest desire to cultivate the impression of Anne’s ‘meekness’
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it may also, more revealingly, be an embarrassed response to the fact that Anne had based Huntingdon’s language and
behaviour on that of her singularly wayward brother, Branwell.
Charlotte proved to be an equally unsympathetic critic of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. She stresses its
‘faults’ and, most revealingly, seeks for an appropriately local metaphor to explain its ‘rusticity’: ‘It is rustic all
through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath.’ This ‘knottiness’ does not necessarily refer to the
quality that subsequent readers have most admired in Wuthering Heights, its extraordinary narrative complexity. It
plays with shifts of time and perception by balancing the complementary, but not really concordant, viewpoints of two
major and five minor narrators. It juxtaposes the worlds of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights; the passive
gentility of the Lintons and the restless, classless energy of Heathcliff; the complacency of insiders and the disruptive
intrusions of outsiders. Above all, it opposes freedom and restraint, love and pain, while holding all oppositions in a
very specific geographical area, in a tight community, and within an exceptionally neat dynastic pattern. The exposed