Brontë family. - The Essence of the Brontes: a Compilation with Essays

1. Introduction: Muriel Spark and the Bronts
   by Boyd Tonkin

Boyd Tonkin

In 1976, by then long resident in Italy, Muriel Spark resumed a correspondence with her old friend Hugo Manning. One letter from Rome thanks him for the gift of a book about the Bronts. For the fted and garlanded writer, now in her late fifties and 14 novels into a career that would comprise 22 in all as well as short stories, drama and autobiography, the book brought back memories. It sent her to a time when she had nothing and had, so far, done almost nothing of the work that she truly valued. To Manning, a poet, journalist and fellow spiritual seeker whom she had known and liked in her penniless Kensington bedsit years of the early 1950s, she recalled my days of Bront study, along with all the poverty, adventure and hope that went with them.

That mellow reminiscence conjures up the picture of striving apprentice author learning from the Haworth sisters in a spirit of humility, emulation and admiration. True, for three or four years after 1949, the Bronts lives and works became something of an obsession for Spark. Among the four siblings, it was the author of WutheringHeights who most directly engaged her. A BBC television script from 1961 confesses that For many years I was intensely occupied by Emily Bront almost haunted. Already a divorced mother, but separated from her son Robin (who lived with her parents in Edinburgh), Spark had bounced around shabby post-war London from room to room and job to job most notably, as the secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of its journal PoetryReview. Tethered to this shambolic and penurious Bohemia, she dreamed of the proud autonomy that would allow her to flourish as a woman and an artist. No wonder the sibyls of the West Riding appealed.

Her first book, published in 19 51, was ChildofLight, a reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley still strikingly modern in its perceptive rescue of the author of Frankenstein from the shadow of her husband and parents. By the time of its appearance, however, the Bronts had taken charge. Sparks plan for a joint biography to partner a new edition of Annes works came to nothing. Still, from that project she salvaged an edition of the familys letters, published in 1954. She also edited an edition of Emilys verse (1952) and then, partly in collaboration with poet and critic Derek Stanford, her lover, collaborator, fellow-adventurer and (for a while) soulmate, produced a wider critical-biographical study (1953). These were fringe productions, researched and edited on a shoestring by aspirational young literati under the patronage of shiftless rogues and mavericks. The phrase labour of love does indeed apply. But, as with Sparks co-dependent link to the erratic and exasperating Stanford, other emotions came into play as well.

Turn to what she wrote about the Bront sisters, and as so often with Spark every presumption will be overthrown. (She did have some sympathy to spare for drifting and bibulous brother Branwell, so like the London literary barflies she knew, but says little about him except to note that his great misfortune was that he was a man and thus exempt from his sisters elevating struggle.) Page by waspish, probing page, she does not hail a trio of role models or genuflect before a family of sainted path-finders. Quite the opposite. Spark tends to take the Bront greatness as read, save for a warm appreciation of the traditional aspects of Emilys verse against the unjustified neglect of anthologists.

Instead, she fires at the Yorkshire heroines a sceptical salvo of reservations, qualifications, caveats and critiques. From her impatience with Charlotte as a bossy impresario who turned her family into catchpenny melodrama, and her disgust with Emilys perverted martyrdom, through to her verdict, as late as 1992, that poor overlooked Anne was in the end not good enough, a querulous, suspicious or even downright hostile note recurs. Spark may love the Bronts and their work, but that does not mean she likes them very much.

What is going on here? A sentimental or conventional reader might expect the hero-worship due to stalwart godmothers in art from a successor who indirectly took the profit from their pains. Yet Spark never in any way sentimental or conventional sees flaws, marks limits and scolds follies at every turn. Many of her assessments read not so much like a cool appraisal as a family quarrel, bitter and intimate. She may deplore the Bronts posthumous encirclement by soppy legend and unfounded speculation. Yet Spark herself reaches the point where she can say about Emily that if she had not died of consumption, she would have died mentally deranged. This, we feel, is strictly personal.

So Sparks involvement with the Bronts as critic, editor and fragmentary biographer does not take the form of simple homage or tribute. It serves instead as an exorcism or perhaps an inoculation. She has to get the sisters out of her system, if necessary by ingesting as much of their unquiet spirit as will protect her against fixture attacks. In the essay on the Bronts as teachers impossible to read now without thinking of Miss Jean Brodie, whose Prime would arrive in 1961 Spark writes that genius, if thwarted, resolves itself in an infinite capacity for inflicting trouble, or at least finding fault. That thwarting and its rancorous side-effects seemed to dog her at this period. As Martin Stannards exemplary biography of Spark puts it, In her art and life she demanded acknowledgement while receiving little in either sphere. She was not breaking through as a major poet and Stanford was hesitant about marriage. In her early thirties, stalled on more than one front, the fledgling poet, not-yet-novelist and woman of letters found in the Bronts both a deeply tempting path through hardship to glorious achievement and the wrong road for her. She inflicted trouble and found fault with them, the better to define her own best route.

This intimate dispute had tangled roots. On Spark as both poet and critic, the rebooted classicism associated with T.S. Eliot in his post-war pomp cast a sort of spell. Already separate in outlook and aesthetics, she had via the Poetry Society and its ramshackle hangers-on had quite enough of the surreal balderdash of the Neo-Romantic movement. Her pen was from the first, as Auden wrote of Christopher Isherwoods, strict and adult. In her visit to Haworth churchyard for the BBC she would remark in cooler, more balanced terms than the lonely striver of a decade previously could muster on the gulf between Emilys dedication to primitive forces of life and death and her own fictional art of ironic, analytic miniaturism, developing like cells in a honeycomb.