The dark world of the Bronte sisters

The Taste Of Sorrow
Jude Morgan
Hatchette
454 pages

For a family steeped in almost fierce insularity, the Bronte sisters have supported something of a cottage industry of writers devoted to examining every aspect of their brief, brilliant lives.

Jude Morgan’s sketch of the Bronte saga is part of a tradition that includes Elizabeth Gaskell and Daphne Du Maurier. It succeeds largely due to the author’s skill at filling the gaps between the familiar markers of his protagonists’ lives with writing that is both appealing and plausible

The Taste Of Sorrow unfolds mostly through the eyes of Charlotte, but each of the family gets a proper look-in. This includes the two eldest Bronte girls, Maria and Elizabeth, whose deaths at school leave Charlotte cruelly exposed from her safety of ‘the middle’. The Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, run by Reverend Carus Wilson, with his ghoulish accounts of hellfire and death, formed the blueprint for Lowood in Jane Eyre.

Jude Morgan (a name as misleadingly androgynous as the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell which the Brontes published under) skillfully draws out Reverend Patrick Bronte, with his courtly speech and careful distancing from unpleasant truths, as well as Aunt Branwell, who moves to Haworth parsonage to look after her dead sister’s children.

There is also Patrick Branwell, the gifted but overindulged brother whose early death from consumption was fuelled by an addiction to laudanum. The tight togetherness of the Bronte children, growing up in the shadow of the graveyard and the moors, is captured in the urgency with which the siblings weave their magical kingdoms of Gondal and Angria, setting them down in hundreds of matchbox-sized books.

Morgan’s writing is understated, sometimes to the point of being elliptical. The approach works well on the whole, especially with the often-overlooked Anne. Like Charlotte, she makes her living as a governess, finding solace from the fatigue and loneliness of her job in writing. “Verses, that’s all,” she soothes her employer after one of her charges vomits deliberately into her workbag. “Later, she does try to retrieve them. Its not absolutely necessary…Still she passionately believes, quiet one though she is, that words written on a page are sacred.” 

Charlotte herself comes across as painfully shy, with acid retorts flashing across her mind, followed by immediate remorse. “Before she can block it off, comes the thought Ugly old man,” as her father violently curses his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, for his audacity in proposing to her. Emily, the most internal of the sisters, moves moodily and (as is perhaps inevitable) taciturnly through the pages.

The most rivetting moments come when the bond between the sisters flashes to the fore, as when Emily warns a lovelorn Charlotte against pouring out her talent on letters to her married tutor in Brussels. There is also her fine fury when she finds Charlotte reading her verses without her permission. Though it takes days, Charlotte eventually convinces Emily to share her work. The three sisters revive the childhood tradition of working together, meeting at the dining table after an exhausting day of work to write, read and critique. “We three again, around the table, the shuffle of papers, the lattice of talk; this is right, something must come of this,” thinks Charlotte.

Amongst the most poignant moments is towards the end, when Charlotte faces the silence surrounding her after the deaths of Emily and Anne. After her marriage to Nicholls, she sobs into the arms of her husband at her unexpected contentment. “Because I feel I am getting their share. We all should have had this…I just wish I could hear their voices once more.” She died less than a year after her marriage, in the early stages of pregnancy.

The Taste Of Sorrow manages to bring alive the dark complexity of the landscapes and lives that shaped works like Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. But Morgan illuminates the familiar image of condemned genius with the spark of joy and fulfillment the sisters found in their creativity. That, it may be argued, was a very rare taste of pleasure indeed. Particularly in a world where the tragic death of young women was no great matter after all.