It would have been hard for such a sensation-merchant to resist including the spicy rumour that Charlotte had been the victim of "a great tempest" of unrequited love. But there were other writers who went further and explicitly stated that there had been not merely love but mutual passion. One of these was an obsessive enthusiast called John Malham-Dembleby, in whom the "Brontemania" of the turn of the century reached proportions that can only be described as pathological.
Mrs Gaskell had tried to defend the Bronte sisters from charges of wilful coarseness by claiming that they had merely written down what they saw before them in the shape of Haworth's rude inhabitants and their brother's debaucheries. In his book The Key to The Bronte Works (1911) Malham-Dembleby takes this claim to its hyperbolical conclusion, asserting that there was nothing in Charlotte's novels that was not a direct copy from life. He often begins with a sane or semi-sane hunch - such as the idea that Mrs Gaskell had not told the full story of Charlotte's Brussels life and that Charlotte had felt passionately about Heger - but shoots off completely into other territories in which he is wholly incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction. To identify Heger as the love of Charlotte's life is one thing; but to claim equally insistently that Charlotte was the author of Wuthering Heights is quite another. Later on, he declares that the French popular novelist Eugene Sue, author of the bestseller The Wandering Jew, had presented the true history of Monsieur Heger's reciprocal passion for Charlotte in a serialised novel of 1850-51, Miss Mary, ou l'Institutrice - though where Sue was supposed to have picked up this secret information about their "dangerous friendship" we are not told.
If Malham-Dembleby's mad views received more of a hearing than they deserved, it was because he offered a mutant version of the sort of agenda pursued by saner Bronte enthusiasts who were keen to identify the real-life persons and places of the novels. In 1911 his Key to the Bronte Works was published with the imprimatur of W.W. Yates of the Bronte Society who was one of the subscribers to the volume. And in 1906 he had acted as adviser to the director of the National Portrait Gallery, who, as a result, purchased what ought to have been recognised as an obvious forgery, a picture supposedly of Charlotte by Heger (the forger spelt Heger's name wrong and hadn't even bothered to rub out sufficiently an earlier inscription which read "Miss Mary Vickers").
Questions were asked in the House of Commons about the portrait's genuineness and in 1913 it was finally unmasked as bogus. Malhain-Dembleby may have propagated the unwelcome theory that there had been reciprocal but unconsummated passion between Charlotte and Heger, but even more damaging reports had also begun to circulate. A book was published in France alleging they had had a sexual relationship. It was this sort of unfounded allegation that Heger's son was determined to silence and which explains why he was so keen to make the letters public. Once published, he felt, they would "lay open the true significance of what has hitherto been spoken of as the `secret of Charlotte Bronte' and show how groundless is the suspicion which has resulted from the natural speculations of biographers". It seemed to him better "to lay bare the very innocent mystery, than to let it be supposed there is anything to hide".
Despite this attempt to downplay Charlotte's "innocent" secret, the press responded with uninhibited excitement when the letters appeared in the Times in 1913. Since the 1890s, newspapers had been prepared to run stories on almost any Bronte subject, however trivial. The high Victorian emphasis on martyrdom, sickness and death had given way to a public appetite for romantic sentiment. But if the Bronte story was lacking in anything, it was love interest. Popular writers and journalists had been attempting to supply this want in books like Stories of Authors' Loves (1904), and Twelve Great Passions (1912), and in newspaper articles such as "Charlotte Bronte's Love Story", serialised in the Weekly Sun in 1896. These had attempted to find romance in Charlotte's relationship with her husband, but the marriage was lacking in the sort of sensation value readers were beginning to demand.
The search for Bronte love stories would eventually find its most ludicrous expression in the Hollywood film of the 1940s, Devotion, in which Emily, bizarrely, dies of unrequited love for Arthur Nicholls [Charlotte's longtime admirer and, briefly, husband], and Heger is played as a lecherous French roue who takes Charlotte to the local funfair to teach her a thing or two in the tunnel of love. Before the release of the Heger letters, the press had had little opportunity to find romance in the Bronte story. Afterwards they could not get enough of it: under the headline More Bronte Love Letters, one paper even attempted to compete with the excitement of Charlotte's secret passion with an unpromising story about a Miss Burder to whom Patrick Bronte had made an unsuccessful proposal of marriage.
Those who saw themselves as the guardians of Charlotte's reputation responded less enthusiastically to the Heger letters. The emotional quality of their knee-jerk defences of their heroine suggests how threatened they felt. Clement Shorter was placed in a position of some embarrassment. As the editor of Charlotte's correspondence, he had carved out a niche for himself as a Bronte expert, and, in that role, he had previously thrown cold water on the "silly and offensive" imputation that Charlotte could have been infatuated with a married man. It was as if anyone who suggested that her feelings for Heger had been warmer than the ordinary gratitude felt by a pupil for a teacher would be accusing her of discreditable conduct which would pull the pedestal from underneath her.
YET the letters were unquestionably passionate. Unfortunately for Shorter, their appearance out of the blue also seemed to suggest to the public that he knew less about Charlotte than he had previously claimed. Called upon to comment on them, he blustered his way through, repeating what he had always said: that there was nothing there "that any enthusiastic woman might not write to a man double her age, who was a married man with a family, and who had been her teacher". In his earnestness to remove the offensive imputation, Shorter's expert knowledge on Charlotte Bronte and her circle deserted him. Charlotte was born in 1816; Heger in 1809. Only an enormous stretch of the imagination could describe an age gap of seven years as constituting "double her age".
The problem was that the letters' intensity of emotion, however platonic, did not sit comfortably with the sanctified ideal Charlotte had come to represent. In response to their publication, Shorter's friend W. Robertson Nicholl printed a "Vindication of Charlotte Bronte" in the Times in a desperate attempt to keep alive the vision of the angel in the house. "The truest of daughters and a pattern of domesticity, life was for her not a home but a school, and her heart was ever going out to that world of teachers and pupils", he wrote in an awkward attempt at justification.
Defensive responses were not confined to those who clung to the image of Charlotte as domestic saint. Her feminist supporters were equally disquieted. A letter in the Yorkshire Post decried the "recent aspersions that have been cast on the personality and character of Charlotte Bronte" while hailing her as a "leader in the movement for the intellectual uplifting of womanhood". The correspondent not only defended Charlotte's sexual "purity", but pigeonholed her as a political figure who had "set forth the iniquity of the system that denies the womanhood their just rights in the making and administering of the laws of this country . . ."
Charlotte's passion, suppressed by Gaskell, had been recovered, but at a cost. Her relationship with Heger subsequently became established in many accounts of the Bronte story as a tragic romance with a Mills and Boon flavour, its significance to her literary development swamped in a bath of sentiment. Even Winifred Gerin, the otherwise clear-sighted Bronte biographer, treated the episode with emotional indulgence. A play she wrote on the subject early on in her career, My Dear Master, was described in a review of 1955 as rising "no higher than a women's magazine serial".
By 1963 the Heger-Charlotte relationship had been so frequently and inappropriately romanticised that it was ripe for ridicule. A parodic "opera", Le Sorelle Bronte, appeared in New York in which the Belgian professor features as a Latin lover demanding passionate kisses with the words "Dammi uno baccio . . . Sulla bocca, Carlotta." Included in the libretto is an illustration, based on Branwell's famous portrait of his sisters, showing Charlotte in a provocatively low-cut dress and a come-hither expression! The Victorian guardians of her moral reputation must have turned in their graves.