An extract from The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller
During the first years of the twentieth century, Charlotte Bronte's popular image remained that of the moral heroine originally created by Mrs Gaskell and codified by so many lesser writers. But if a single event could be said to have exploded her sainthood, it occurred on July 29th 1913, when the Times printed four letters she had written in 1844- 45 to her Belgian teacher, Constantin Heger. The publication caused a storm of controversy. Issues of biographical ethics - of the propriety of exposing the private lives of public figures - were hotly debated. The guardians of Charlotte's moral reputation did not know how to cope with the evidence that their idol had fallen, all too humanly, in love with a married man.
In some ways, the sudden appearance of the Heger letters looks like a biographer's wish-fulfilment, a real-life epiphany as exciting as the fictional account in A.S. Byatt's 1990 novel Possession of a researcher's discovery of a Victorian poet's hidden writings. What the letters revealed soon came to be known as "the secret of Charlotte Bronte". But looking at the proliferation of subsequent interpretations, it becomes clear that their content is more fugitive than that suggests. The letters have been read as the expression of a conscientious pupil's gratitude towards a teacher; as the culmination of a hysterical schoolgirl infatuation; as evidence of a tragic unrequited grande passion; as symptoms of a neurotic father fixation; as an imaginative act of self-dramatisation; and as a comment on Charlotte's literary ambition.
This diversity of interpretation demonstrates how malleable the raw material of biography can be, how dependent it is on the eye of the beholder. But even if we had a God's eye view into Charlotte's mind, her feelings for Heger would probably still appear confused and contradictory. Biographers trying to create a self-consistent interpretation may have been tempted to believe that there must be a single true reading, but it may be more realistic to allow the letters to remain inconclusive and multiform, and to take as an analogy Virginia Woolf's insight that "a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand".
What is most striking about the Heger letters is that they do not speak in a unitary voice. Written in French, though one has a postscript in English, their tone is shifting, changeable, unstable, which may explain why they have provoked such different responses. At times, Charlotte indeed writes in the courteous tone of a grateful pupil; at others, she seems to be dramatising her feelings in the manner of a novel; elsewhere, her style reaches an unbearable pitch of desperate, needy emotion; yet the closest she gets to confessing to being in love is to tell Heger that she loves the French language for his sake.
If the letters are ambiguous, so was Charlotte's relationship with Constantin Heger. When they met, she was an ambitious 25-year-old hungry for intellectual development. At 32, he was still young, though married with a growing family. As a teacher, and as husband of the school's headmistress, he was inevitably in a position of authority, but he could hardly have been a father figure in any literal sense.
She began as his pupil, but was a very unusual student who must have been a fascinating change from the recalcitrant teenagers he was used to dealing with. She went on to become his colleague, teaching classes in the school, and also his teacher, giving him and his brother-in-law English lessons (she found their accents highly amusing). Perhaps it is understandable if Heger's wife began to cool towards this intriguing new inhabitant of their household. By June 1843, Charlotte believed that Madame had become suspicious and told Ellen Nussey [her close friend with whom she corresponded for many years]: "I fancy I begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it sometimes makes me laugh and at other times nearly cry".
At some level, Madame clearly felt threatened by the English teacher. Years later, while commenting on Charlotte's letters to her husband, she compared her to the hysterical schoolgirls she was accustomed to dealing with (one wonders whether she witnessed her pupils developing crushes on her husband with irritating frequency), though she went on to add that this independent, intense, older Englishwoman was far more dangerous because less easy to understand. It seems, from the account of another pupil, that Heger was the sort of man who enjoyed being in a position of emotional power over his students: he liked to reduce girls to tears (as he did with Charlotte), at which point he would melt and become gentle.
This sort of manipulative flirtation may have been easy for Heger to get away with, as pupils and teachers at the Pensionnat seem to have habitually communicated in more emotionally charged language than one might expect. After leaving, Charlotte wrote to one of her pupils as "My dear little Victoire", telling her how she "loved" her students. She reassured another pupil, Mathilde, of her "affection"; Mathilde responded by pouring out her soul, telling her teacher, "it seems to me that when I write to you the door of my heart opens". Nothing could be further from the British formality of Roe Head, where Charlotte did not even call her pupils by their first names. As a reserved if inwardly passionate Yorkshirewoman, she may have invested such freedom of expression, when it came from Constantin Heger, with a deeper significance than was intended.
Yet there may have been a mutually intense element to the relationship, even though Charlotte felt more romantic about Heger than he did about her. He must have been gratified by her response to his teaching, and the high standards he set her reveal his estimate of her abilities. His corrections to her essays suggest an element of mutual intellectual challenge; there is nothing flippant or noncommittal about his attitude towards her work which is, rather, highly focused and engaged.
Charlotte had returned alone to the Pensionnat in January 1843 after the death of her aunt had called her home from her first stint in Brussels with Emily. She went back alone, but as her emotional dependence on Heger increased, and his wife grew ever chillier, she became more and more isolated and subject to depression. By October - after the nightmarishly lonely summer vacation which would feature so powerfully in Villette and which drove her to the desperate measure of making a "real confession" to a priest in the Catholic cathedral of Ste Gudule - she felt so alienated and distrusting of Madame that she gave in her notice, only to have Monsieur persuade her to stay. By the end of the year, she had made up her mind. On January 1st 1844, she left Brussels for good.
The four "Heger letters" which survive from what must have been a larger correspondence were written between July 1844 and November 1845. The first, of July 24th 1844, begins in a friendly but not intimate style. Charlotte is "well aware" that it is not her turn to write - Heger has not yet answered her previous communication - but feels she must take advantage of the fact that an English friend travelling to the Continent will be able to forward a letter (postage costs were not negligible at that date).
Suddenly, however, she bursts into a passionate cry which suggests that her previous letter had overstepped the mark: "Ah Monsieur! I once wrote you a letter which was hardly rational, because sadness was wringing my heart, but I shall do so no more." She is afraid, she goes on, of forgetting French: afraid, in other words, of anything that might block communication with Heger.
Yet the real passion of the letter, its climax, has less to do with Heger himself than with the intense, long-standing literary ambition which his committed teaching had validated: she confesses that her dream is to write a book and dedicate it to her master, but she knows that the career of letters is closed to her. After such anguished honesty, she pulls back. The tone changes abruptly as if she feels she has gone too far. "Please assure Madame of my esteem," she writes in the voice of the respectful former pupil.
The second letter, written on October 24th, is much shorter, and was delivered by another English friend travelling to Brussels. Heger had still not replied, and Charlotte now begs him to write, carefully remembering nevertheless to ask after his wife and children. Her next letter, written on January 8th 1845, reveals that he has again failed to respond.
It opens in medias res without the customary "Monsieur", as if it is not a letter at all but a fragment of a novel:
Mr Taylor returned, I asked him if he had a letter for me - "No, nothing."
"Patience" - I say - "His sister will be coming soon" - Miss Taylor returned. "I have nothing for you from M. Heger," she says, "neither letter nor message."
When I had taken in the full meaning of these words . . . I did my utmost not to cry not to complain -
But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant's grip - one's faculties rise in revolt - and one pays for outward calm by an almost unbearable inner struggle
Day and night I find neither rest nor peace - if I sleep I have tormenting dreams . . ."