Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life

Samantha Ellis

Agnes Grey

Anne Bronte

Introduction by Samantha Ellis

A LONE cur howled across the sleet-drenched moors as I, in semi-transparent skeletal form, struggled to the door of Miss Samantha Ellis’s temporary dwelling in Haworth. Having discovered she was writing a book about me, I had come to plead with her to stop forthwith, for I did not wish my life to be arbitrarily exploited, however fast the bicentenary of my birth might be approaching.

It was not my aim to argue with Miss Ellis’s inaccuracies, inelegancies, or irrelevancies when we met, nor rebuke her curious attempt to prove that my treasured pebbles were the droppings of dinosaurs. Nor would I deign to refer to those dreams she related, in which she had supposedly found me sitting at the end of her bed, begging to be written about. Everyone must deal with their unfortunate proclivities according to their own moral fibre, however malnourished it may be.

I did intend though to question her having the audacity to wonder at my taking nine days to write my sprightly preface to the second edition of Wildfell Hall – a very long time, Miss Ellis propounds, to write a mere thousand words. Are we athletes? Is writing a race? Does she use an egg-timer herself while compiling each wayward paragraph?

But what I objected to most strongly was Miss Ellis’s incessant projection of her own subjectivity on to mine. O how passionately did I wish she would stop entwining my life story so cloyingly with her own! I did not want my Irish-Cornish-Yorkshire parentage hollowly compared to her Iraqi-British roots, nor my hair colour deemed lighter than hers, and therefore ‘depressing’. Nor need she eat porridge on my account! I felt no desire, either, for empty blandishments on my badly flawed novels. I had by this time recognized that (rather like Miss Ellis herself) I needed better editors than I ever got – and that, despite all of our prancing round and round the drop-leaf dining table, my vexed sisters and I, reading our manuscripts aloud to each other after poor Papa and his outlandish cravat had retired to bed.

Moreover, I wished that Miss Ellis would not subtly taunt and triumph over me with references to her love life, evidently in contrast to my own lack of one. For, indeed, though I am not ashamed of having died in ‘single blessedness’ (a putrid phrase I myself overused), it is aggravating that Miss Ellis sports her acquaintance with a ‘man’ on page 77, who becomes a ‘boyfriend’ by page 106, and later a ‘partner’, in spite of her complaint that he is only ‘five foot ten on a good day’. By the end, reader, she marries him.

Would that I could avenge those subtle slights! But I knew full well by this time Miss Ellis’s unshakeable determination to turn biography into autobiography littered with soliloquies vaguely arising from whatever titbit of information came to hand. On this basis she announces that Emily favoured mutton sleeves, Branwell had a large forehead, the poet Southey forced his daughters to bind 1400 books, and Thomas Bewick was cruel (quite wrong). More bafflingly, she wishes Dorothy Wordsworth and I had met and that I got cream on my bilberry pie, and says she has seen Kate Bush live.

In her earlier book, How to Be a Heroine, Miss Ellis debated which was the best Brontë: Charlotte or Emily. Now, perhaps in contrition for leaving me out, she wants to make a fetish of me. Yet she confesses to a growing impatience with our diaeresis! If I were to gain admittance tonight, my first duty would be to suggest she redirect her energies in future to authors with unaccented surnames.

Finding my desperate knocking all in vain, I began instead a spooky scraping at the window, inspired by the histrionics of Wuthering Heights - I had always a great rapport with my sister Emily, alias Ellis Bell. But this Ellis was deaf to me.

Hence, in muddy flight past the old Black Bull (ah, my hapless brother Branwell!), the Jane Eyre Lino Company, and Heathcliff’s Afternoon Dainties (both new to me), and briefly slipping into what is now dubbed the ‘Bronte waterfall’ (though I have no remembrance of it myself), I returned in defeat to the silence of my Scarborough grave, which Miss Ellis had already sorrowfully visited in appreciation of the drama of my premature demise …

In her new book, Take Courage, playwright Samantha Ellis says the Brontes are "one of the most famous families in history". We’re all taught to admire their pen names, pertinacity, potato peelings and pathos - and the way the three sisters achieved more than Branwell. Anne was in many ways the most fiercely feminist of them all and, despite asthma and TB, had the stamina and chutzpah to write one excessively long and complex novel and one surprisingly short one, and get them published.

The Brontes are all melodrama queens but Charlotte and Emily added silly supernatural elements to the mix. Anne tried to stick to reality. In Agnes Grey, her heroine slaves away as a governess, running after sadistic charges who kick her, spit in her workbag, and torture animals. One of them later even tries to steal her man. But this semi-autobiographical novel is marred by fairy-tale elements - the poor but happy family, an improbable shipwreck, and the magical reappearance of Agnes’s beloved in Scarborough, marriage-ripe. (Anne had a thing about Scarborough.)

The first two hundred and fifty pages of her other novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, are creakingly slow. Once revealed, Helen’s big fat enormous secret (her escape from her no-goodnik husband) is exhaustively unravelled. Huntingdon seemed okay to her at first, a dashing suitor, but as a husband he goes awry, with the drinking, with the cha-cha, “live now, pay later, Diners’ Club” (as Dr Dreyfus puts it in The Apartment). He calls their baby a "little senseless, thankless oyster" and mistreats the dog. His pals are even worse. The Brontes have a violent side.

Anne’s concerns may well be seen as fairly modern and noble. But her characters are inscrutable posturers, always edging oddly toward windows to hide their emotions. Charlotte made Jane Eyre a defiant little girl and a passionate, no-nonsense woman: you root for her throughout. Anne’s books are more artificial, they’re novels of ideas, rinsed in Victorian soap suds. The religiosity of Wildfell Hall in particular is intolerable: dreary Helen’s a self-declared expert on how to secure a comfy hammock in heaven.

Making big claims for both of Anne’s novels, Ellis says their political engagement, class critique, pleas for education, expose of governessing, and the suggestion that mad bad Byronic men may be dangerous to know, "still feel revolutionary". Her own literary aims here are somewhat less ambitious: apart from some insightful, whimsical or frivolous asides, her book just becomes a walk in Anne’s boots, which were probably as muddied as her prose. Big walker, Anne.

Ellis too stalks the moors. She reads Bronte biographies, even that wacko Angria and Gondal juvenilia. She Googles and Pinterests. She dons latex gloves to examine Anne’s last letter or a hideous hair brooch of Charlotte’s. She asks if Anne Bronte invented the romcom (no). And she takes everything, but everything, personally: "wrongfooted, slighted, dissatisfied, bored, over-worked, underpaid and out of her depth – Agnes Grey is brilliant on the peculiar horror of a first job." It’s Ellis who’s scraping at the window.

Reviewed by Lucy Ellmann

Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life

Samantha Ellis

Chatto & Windus, Vintage, £16.99

Agnes Grey

Anne Bronte

Introduction by Samantha Ellis

Chatto & Windus, Vintage, £7.99