CHARLOTTE BRONTË ALWAYS KNEW that she would have to earn her own living. Her father was a clergyman without any income other than the erratic one he drew from his parish; when he died his children would lose even the roof over their heads as Haworth Parsonage would revert to the Church. Unlike her literary creations, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, she had no prospect of an unexpected inheritance or windfall to give her independent means. Unlike her friend, Ellen Nussey, and other middle-class contemporaries, she could not expect her brother to provide for her: even if Branwell succeeded as a portrait painter, it would take years to establish himself and he would have nothing to spare for his three sisters. Unless or until she married, Charlotte had no option but to work.

Charlotte’s future had been mapped out for her as a child of eight. When she entered the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in 1824 it was noted in the column headed “For what educated” that she was to be a governess. To that end her father paid for extra lessons in the “accomplishments”, that is, French and drawing.

Though that experiment in schooling ended disastrously with the deaths of her two elder sisters, Charlotte realised that she would have to gain formal qualifications if she was to be a teacher. In 1831 she enrolled at Roe Head School, near Mirfield, worked her way from the bottom of the class to the top and, in all three terms, succeeded in carrying off the school prize for “emulation rewarded”.

In 1835 Miss Wooler, her kindly headmistress, offered her a post at Roe Head and Charlotte made the uneasy transition from pupil to teacher. The burden of personal obligation was unwittingly increased by Miss Wooler’s offer to take Emily as a pupil free of charge, and accepting Anne in her place when Emily failed to thrive. As Charlotte was the first to admit, she could not have found a better place: she loved and respected Miss Wooler, Roe Head itself was a light and airy house, beautifully situated amid parkland, her closest friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, lived close by, and her duties were not especially onerous since there were never more than a dozen pupils.

Still, Charlotte could not be happy. All her instincts rebelled against the monotony, the drudgery, the waste of her own talents. “The thought came over me,” she scribbled in August 1836, “am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?” Two months later she wrote bitterly: “Stupidity the atmosphere, school-books the employment, asses the society, what in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought?” This was the crux of Charlotte’s problem. It was difficult enough for any of the highly intelligent Brontë sisters to accept such demeaning, mechanical employment as teaching their intellectually inferior social superiors, but to be deprived of the freedom to let their imaginations take wing was more than they could bear.

Emily lasted a mere two months as a pupil at Roe Head: the physical and, more importantly, the mental constraints of school life made her ill and she had to go home. Anne, who was less dependent on the imaginary worlds for her emotional wellbeing, lasted two years before she too succumbed to illness.

Charlotte braved it out for three-and-a-half years but, as her private diary jottings throughout this period reveal, it was at immense personal cost. Gazing out of the schoolroom window during a grammar lesson, she began to drift off into an Angrian reverie and felt the usual urge to write. “I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than any thing I ever produced before. But just then a Dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.”

There was no escape from her pupils even when the school day was finished, for she slept in the same dormitory. Once the girls surprised her as she tried to snatch a few moments’ privacy: lying on her bed in the early evening, she had, as usual, conjured up an Angrian scene to relieve “the craving vacancy”. It grew so vivid and compulsive that she became totally absorbed and could not rouse herself, even when she heard them talking about her. “I wanted to speak — to rise — it was impossible — I felt that this was frightful predicament — that it would not do — the weight pressed me as if some huge animal had flung itself across me.” Such was the hold of the “infernal world” of Angria over her, however, that, try as she might, she could not give it up. A letter from Branwell, who was at home and therefore developing the Angrian chronicles unhindered, was a lifeline: “I lived on its contents for days, in every pause of employment.”

As her 21st birthday approached she dared to hope that there might be another option open to her. She wrote to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, confessing her ardent desire “to be for ever known” as a poetess and enclosing a selection of her work. Southey’s kindly response (so often quoted unfairly and out of context) urged her to write poetry for its own sake, not with a view to celebrity: literature could not be and ought not to be the business of a woman’s life.

Her dreams of escape crushed, Charlotte carefully preserved the letter. “I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print,” she said, “if the wish should rise I’ll look at Southey’s autograph and suppress it.”

Charlotte struggled on at Roe Head for another year but her depression, or what she called the “tyranny of Hypochondria”, was destroying her. In May 1838 she gave up the unequal struggle and resigned. Returning home, she immediately and joyfully threw herself into unrestrained Angrian composition, writing two novelettes in the space of a month. Her recovery was miraculous and almost instantaneous: the cure was Stancliffe’s Hotel.

Juliet Barker is the author of The Brontës, Phoenix Press, £15, and The Brontes: A Life in Letters, Viking, £12.99

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