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In her first-ever published piece of work, ‘Haworth, November 1904’, Virginia Woolf goes on a

literary pilgrimage to a small West Yorkshire village – the place where the Brontë sisters grew up,

lived most of their lives, and wrote their six novels in the tiny parsonage kitchen. Woolf arrives in a

snowstorm, and decides that this is only appropriate considering her reason for coming there: ‘I

understand that the sun very seldom shone on the Brontë family.’ In the end, Haworth turns out to

be a disappointment; not Gothically gloomy, which would fit very nicely with the Brontë myth, but

‘what is worse for artistic purposes ... dingy and commonplace’. In the Brontë Museum, Woolf

stares at a glass case filled with ‘little personal relics’ of the eldest sister, Charlotte Brontë – her

shoes, her muslin dress, her gloves – and feels moved, but also a little disturbed. ‘The natural fate

of such things is to die before the body that wore them,’ she writes, ‘and because these, trifling

and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one

forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer.’

The Haworth Parsonage, also known as the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in the village of Haworth in

West Yorkshire in England (©NTBscanpix)

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Over 150 years after Charlotte Brontë’s death, and over a hundred years after Woolf’s visit, I

peered through the same glass pane at the dull-coloured dress with its impossibly narrow waist;

the pair of miniature, battered leather slippers (the great writer was, apparently, physically very

small); the stockings, delicately unmentioned by Woolf, which looked like a snake’s shed skin. For a

moment I felt connected to both these writers through the trivial nineteenth-century objects that

had survived both of them and would, presumably, survive me. I burst into tears. Then I realised

that I was in public, and I was crying over some socks.

Even today, Charlotte Brontë is something other and more than the writer of four more-or-

less-extraordinary novels, some middling poetry and a huge amount of overheated, soap-operatic

juvenilia about a made-up African country (yes, really). She is a literary icon – a kind of shared

cultural shorthand, as well as, alongside her sisters Anne and Emily, a brand that can sell anything

from biscuits to vampire novels to bottled water. In present-day British culture, perhaps only

Charles Dickens and Jane Austen have the same level of name recognition. Brontë’s and Austen’s

names are often mentioned in the same contexts – great women in literature, great writers of

romantic fiction, subjects of BBC miniseries, faces and quotations printed on tea-towels, coffee

mugs and gift books. (In her Guardian article on Brontë’s posthumous reputation, ‘Reader, I

shagged him’, Tanya Gold is particularly annoyed about the mouse mats on sale at the parsonage,

which are printed with Jane Eyre’s cry that she is a free human being and not a bird to be

ensnared: ‘In Jane Eyre, Charlotte wrote “independent human being”. She did not write

“independent mouse mat”.’) But the two authors are just as often contrasted with each other,

filling two different slots marked ‘female literary genius’ in our cultural imagination: Austen is the

well-mannered, ironic, wry one; Brontë the morbid, solitary, passionate one. Austen is teacups and

quadrilles; Brontë is windswept moors and violent embraces. Indeed, Brontë herself played into

these stereotypes in her famous criticism of Austen: ‘The passions are perfectly unknown to her;

she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood ... [She] was a complete and

most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman’.

Does Charlotte Brontë’s status as a pop-cultural icon illustrate her actual achievements, or

does it just obscure them? Woolf suggests the latter when she says that ‘we forget ... that she was

a great writer’ among the relics and souvenirs at Brontë’s homeplace, and Tanya Gold describes

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stalking balefully around Haworth, dreaming of burning this Brontë ‘death cult’ to the ground and

leaving only a copy of Jane Eyre smoldering in the ashes. So should we try to explode the Brontë

myth, with its merchandise, its tweeness, its reinterpretations and misinterpretations of her work –

or can it, after all, be something to be celebrated?

Mythical status came early to Charlotte Brontë. There is something fairy tale-like about her

story: she was one of three sisters who lived secluded lives in a little parsonage on the Yorkshire

moors. They looked after their alcoholic brother Branwell, and left home only to endure several

miserable stints of governessing and teaching. (At one point Charlotte wrote in her diary that she

felt like vomiting on an importunate student who had shaken her out of her imaginative trance.)

They tried unsuccessfully to set up a school, which they saw as a more reasonable ambition than

writing. And in between all this, they wrote some of the nineteenth century’s greatest novels.

There were, in fact, originally six Brontë siblings: the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, died in

childhood. Maria was their father’s favourite; she was considered to be the prodigy of the family.

The idea that the Brontë sisters who lived into adulthood weren’t even the most talented ones

should be enough to make anyone feel a little dizzy.

The Brontë sisters’ first venture into publication was a book of poetry by all three of them,

published at their own expense. It sold two copies. But in 1847 they managed to get three novels

published: Agnes Grey, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. ‘Brontë Sisters Power Dolls’, a fake

advertisement for a nonexistent set of Brontë-themed action figures that went viral on YouTube a

couple of years ago, illustrates this part of their career. It shows the three sisters disguising

themselves as men in order to get their books accepted by the misogynist publishing industry,

before dramatically tearing off their moustaches and unveiling themselves: ‘Well, the joke’s on you,

you narrow-minded cur! We are women!’ This isn’t a hundred percent historically correct, nor,

sadly, is the part later on where they combine to form a ‘BRONTËSAURUS’ and smash the literary

establishment, but they did eventually drop their masculine-sounding pseudonyms and became

known by their real names. Charlotte took her first faltering steps into literary society, but was too

shy to be much of a success; at one house party given in honour of the celebrated author, she

spent the whole evening talking to the family governess. Then, from 1848 to 1849, Charlotte lost

almost everyone in her life: Branwell died, then, a few weeks later, Emily; then Anne; all,

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apparently, of tuberculosis. Charlotte and her father lived on in the parsonage until finally, in her

late thirties, she disobliged him by marrying his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Not even the most

romantic Brontë fan has been able to interpret this as a great love match, though she did persist in

it against her father’s objections. She died at 38, most likely from pregnancy complications.

Charlotte Brontë (©NTBscanpix)

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These lives, which, summarised, seem undeniably short, blighted and sad, have provided fuel for

any number of film, stage and book adaptations (generally also in the dismal vein; Jude Morgan’s

fascinating novelisation of the Brontës’ lives, for instance, is entitled The Taste of Sorrow). But the

afterlife of their writing is more interesting still. So many years after their first publication, the

Brontë books are firmly in the public domain, meaning that anyone can freely adapt and rework

the texts for their own purposes. But people started adapting Jane Eyre almost as soon as it was

published, especially for the stage. One of Charlotte’s publishers sent her an account of a new

stage version he’d seen, to which the author responded with distinct displeasure: ‘you ... have

shown me a glimpse of what I might call – loathsome, but which I prefer calling strange. Such then

is a sample of what amuses the Metropolitan populace!’ Jane Eyre was also parodied in more

intentional ways, as in Bret Harte’s 1867 ‘condensed novel’, ‘Miss Mix by Ch-l-tte Br-nte’, in which

the heroine frets endlessly about her plainness and falls in love with the gorilla-like Mr Rawjester.

He has three mad wives rather than just the one, and his idea of courtship involves flinging a

candlestick at the heroine’s head, which she dodges ‘submissively but firmly’.

With the advent of the cinema came a wealth of film adaptations of Jane Eyre, but text

adaptations continued to recast the novel in new ways. Jean Rhys’s 1996 novel Wide Sargasso Sea,

which acts as a prequel to Jane Eyre, gives a startling take on the most fascinating lacuna in the

older novel, the character of Bertha Rochester. It neatly skewers the racist and othering tendencies

of Brontë’s text, and is perhaps one of the few reimaginings of any novel that irrevocably changes

the way we read the original text. More recently, Jane Eyre has opened up to accommodate new

literary trends. Sherri Browning Erwin’s literary mash-up Jane Slayre tweaks and expands Brontë’s

text, turning it into even more of a paranormal romance than the original: Jane is a vampire slayer,

Lowood School is a breeding-ground for zombies, and Rochester’s inconvenient first wife is a

werewolf (which, really, makes about as much sense as Brontë’s depiction of Bertha’s mental

illness). Eve Sinclair’s novel Jane Eyre Laid Bare uses the same mash-up technique to take the novel

in a more Fifty Shades of Grey-inspired direction, turning the hints of eroticism in the original text

into full-fledged sex scenes. On the other side of the explicitness scale is Little Miss Brontë: Jane

Eyre by Jennifer Adams and Alison Oliver, which turns the classic tale of love and maiming into an

illustrated counting primer for babies. In some ways, Little Miss Brontë is the most promising

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proposition of the three, with its defamiliarising, child’s-eye view of the book – though its

marketing copy, offering ‘a fashionable way to introduce your toddler to the world of classic

literature’, is a little wince-inducing.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this array of adaptations is that for all their variety,

they’re based on the same novel. Of the Brontë novels, only Emily’s Wuthering Heights has had a

similar level of cultural impact – though, understandably, many versions skim over Heathcliff’s

unfortunate dog-killing tendencies, focusing instead on his brooding mystique. (There is a

Wuthering Heights for babies, which seems ambitious, to say the least.) But Charlotte Brontë’s first

published novel and biggest popular success still represents her in the cultural imagination today.

Charlotte herself was, at best, ambivalent about the tendency to associate her with her most

famous book: she was furious with William Thackeray when he introduced her to an acquaintance

as ‘Jane Eyre’, and she wrote in a letter that she wanted Lucy Snowe, the heroine of her last novel,

to be less easy to love than Jane had been.

Reading one’s way through a pile of Brontë adaptations might lead one to think that

Charlotte Brontë’s work is all fairy-tale Gothic, with feisty governesses, irascible masters, and wild-

eyed pyromaniacs around every corner. But there’s considerably more to her work than that.

Shirley, for instance, is a sprawling, uneasy mix of social commentary and romance, Brontë’s only

attempt at a big North-of-England social problem novel in the Elizabeth Gaskell style, and in some

ways her most explicitly feminist one. Here the wealthy, dashing master of the house is not a

Byronic, square-jawed type but the young title character, Shirley, who, like Rochester, ends up

marrying one of her employees. Less well known still is The Professor, the first adult novel Brontë

wrote. Even after Brontë had become a best-selling author, and in spite of great persistence on her

part, no one would publish it – more or less the nineteenth-century equivalent of J.K. Rowling

having a children’s book manuscript stashed in a drawer and being unable to get it into print. The

Professor is far from her best work, with its priggish, unlikeable male narrator and lapses into

genuinely terrible poetry, but Brontë seems to have had a great deal of affection for it. After yet

another publisher rejected the manuscript, she wrote that ‘[m]y feelings towards it can only be

paralleled by those of a doting parent towards an idiot child.’ Her husband finally got it published

some years after her death.

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Perhaps The Professor isn’t quite ripe for a big-screen adaptation, but the same can’t be

said for the novel that many readers love best: her final book, Villette. Like The Professor, Villette

has elements of autobiography, drawing on the months Charlotte and Emily Brontë spent

furthering their education at a boarding school in Belgium. Here, Charlotte developed a deep

attachment to her married professor of literature, Constantin Héger, though it’s unclear whether

this was her one grand passion, or something closer to platonic admiration for the first man to take

her writing seriously. Either way, she set her last novel amid the simmering tensions of a boarding

school in an invented, French-speaking European country, and cast a short, dark and irritable

literature professor as its unlikely romantic lead. Though it’s often seen as a melancholy, riddling

novel, full of mental agony and repressed emotion and enlivened only by the occasional opium-

fuelled escapade, the structure of Villette’s romance plot makes it an early forerunner of modern-

day chick-lit novels. Lucy Snowe pines after the traditionally handsome, blockheaded Wrong Man,

who is oblivious to her feelings – ‘he, I believe, never remembered that I had eyes in my head,

much less a brain behind them’ – while at the same time enjoying spiky, teasing, increasingly

flirtatious encounters with the Right Man. Villette even features that staple of rom-coms, the

‘meet-cute’: when Lucy and the professor of literature, Paul Emmanuel, meet for the first time, he

interprets her character by examining the shape of her head, using the pseudoscientific principles

of physiognomy.

Much as we might long for them, enterprising Brontë adapters have yet to give us a

zombie-infested Shirley, a Professor interspersed with sex scenes or a lavishly illustrated Villette for

babies (teaching rudimentary French, maybe?). These novels just don’t seem to have the cultural

infectiousness that makes Jane Eyre so infinitely adaptable. They are Brontë, yes, but they are not

part of our shared language in the same way that Jane Eyre is. There can be something off-putting

about the Brontë industry, as there is, perhaps, about any kind of business that grows so profusely

around a creative presence, interpreting it, transforming it, and using it for its own myriad ends.

Sometimes, as with Wide Sargasso Sea, the afterlife of Brontë produces interpretations that reach

the heart of her creative work and spin it into something wholly new; more often, it produces

biscuits and mouse mats.

But then, even this kind of cultural shorthand has its own pleasures. On my way to the viva

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for my Ph.D thesis on Charlotte Brontë’s novels, I spotted a Brontë Water supply truck. I took it as a

good sign, and my parents snapped photographs of me grinning, slightly maniacally, in front of the

slogan. Even this apparently wholly unliterary product picks up some cachet from its association

with the literary sisters. On the Brontë Water website we find dreamy depictions of ‘the rugged

moorlands which were the playground of the Brontë children’, and the water is imagined as ‘gently

filter[ing] through the sandstone layers beneath the heathland expanses which were a constant

spur to their youthful imaginations’. Uncharitable as it is, it’s hard not to remember that in the

Brontës’ days the Haworth water supply was a serious health concern; Patrick Brontë repeatedly

lobbied the Board of Health to have it inspected, and the inspector eventually found that

contaminated water from the graveyard by the Brontë parsonage was leaking into the drinking

water. But when people become icons, these killjoy facts sometimes stop mattering, or matter in

different ways. Cultural touchstones can’t always be seen clearly, but they can be subverted,

messed around with, played with. Charlotte Brontë’s afterlives may make it harder to remember

the complexities and subtleties of the writer, but in return, she becomes something else: a bigger

playground, a spur to our own imaginations.