Inside were six books, tied together with string. A gift?
One of the works was familiar: Jane Eyre by Currer Bell. I’d never finished it. I’d been busy with the wedding and so set the first volume aside, where all three still languished by my bed at Great Barr Hall.
I picked up the others. “Bell” again, but this time “Ellis Bell” and “Acton Bell.” I flipped to the frontispiece of one novel and a sheet of paper slipped out.
A letter. A familiar hand. My Dr. Crosby.
I bent in and drew the candle so close to the page I was afraid it would catch alight. What I read there knocked the breath out of me.
In one novel—Agnes Grey—you might discern certain similarities to the Ouseburns and our lives there—
The authors’ names—Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—recall a family who share their initials—
I thought it best to write, to warn you—
There was a buzzing in my ears as I drew the volume that contained Agnes Grey toward me. My shadow fell across the pages. The candle was burning low. I read in a furor, not caring if Sir Edward awoke to find me there on the floor. I had to know how Anne had made a mockery of us. Of me. Unfeeling. Ungrateful. Arrogant.
A twisted distortion of Thorp Green Hall swam before me. There was the lady of the house, “handsome, dashing… who certainly required neither rouge nor padding to add to her charms.” She was indulgent and shallow, cared only for “frequenting parties and dressing at the very top of fashion.” Anne had even repeated descriptions of me she’d included in her letter to Charlotte, all those years before. One daughter was “far too big-boned and awkward ever to be called pretty.” The other, a flirt, “knew all her charms, and thought them even greater than they were.”
No Georgie, calling out for water. No sweet Mary, who’d loved Miss Brontë and cried for a week when she left us. Anne had excised Branwell entirely and replaced Edmund with a caricature of a straightforward country man, well humored and gregarious, who cared only for his horses.
Since then I’d read and reread her rendition incessantly, smarting at the injustice of it. And I’d read the other novels too. Wuthering Heights, strange and romantic as Emily herself, a work birthed on the Haworth moors, and Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, which I owned was better, if self-centered. For hadn’t Blanche Ingram suffered too? Or the first wife, the one Mr. Rochester had cast aside? Readers were so quick to lap up the sorrows of moping governesses when that was only one side of the story.
You are a poet, Branwell had told me once, although he didn’t have to; he could have had me anyway. But he was dead, and unlike his sisters, he had left nothing of himself behind in ink other than a few verses signed “Northangerland” in Mr. Bellerby’s newspaper and some worthless ramblings about me that Charlotte had burned.
Sir Edward’s ring was on my finger, and my children were lost to me—to marriage, my sister, that world of men that Ned would soon enter and that I could never understand. As I sat there on the deck, trying to taste whether the water that splashed my face was from sky or sea, an urge rose inside me, as sudden as it was alien. It was the almost overwhelming desire to write a novel of my own. A story about me.
If the Brontë sisters could do it, why shouldn’t I?
I’d sequestered paper for my belated reply to Dr. Crosby. It flapped in the breeze, so I held it fast against my knee. The inkwell was wedged between my feet. My pen was poised, dripping with what, for the pain it had cost me, might as well have been my blood. Plain, poor, and virginal, Charlotte hadn’t even sampled half of it—the mewling infants, the cold marriage bed, the years of silence before death.
How had it felt that day at the beginning, when Branwell had arrived? I closed my eyes to bring the scene in the schoolroom back to me. Branwell laughing up at me through the window. Ned and the girls, young and spirited. Miss Brontë meek, beside me though she might have been a thousand miles away. Oh, and I had been a dead and shriveled thing, with one foot firmly in the grave.
I opened my eyes.
Already a widow in all but name, I wrote. Fitting that I must, yet again, wear black.
“What are you doing, Lydia?” asked Sir Edward. “I thought you were reading.”
I jumped.
He had emerged from below and was squinting at me, haloed as I was by the dazzling sun. His face already looked ruddy against his white boating jacket.
“Nothing,” I said, drawing a clean page above the first. “At least, nothing important.”
The wind lifted my unpinned hair from the roots, massaging my scalp. A few black strands flew into my field of vision, as dark as they had been on my first honeymoon. I could almost believe, out here where the sea mirrored only the sky, that I was young and that it was Edmund who stood beside me, that we were only just starting out.
“Come here.” Sir Edward walked to the stern and stared toward the shore.
It was early enough in our time together that I did as he said and barely even resented it.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked, once I was next to him.
I nodded, although the French coast was a haze to me, a dark and ragged scar across a watercolor awash with dancing whites and blues. There was a stronger gust of wind. My hair took on a will of its own, Medusa-like, and wrapped around my throat.
I struggled to free myself, and the page I had written on—my first feeble attempt at honesty—escaped my hand. Like a bird, it settled on the railing before fluttering to the water, which was darker when you looked deep into it rather than toward the horizon.
I glanced at Sir Edward. He hadn’t noticed.
My words would be bleeding into the sea. But perhaps they had been foolish anyway. What had I been thinking? What could writing it all down possibly achieve?
There were women from here to England, crying over curtain fabric, scolding their children, and aching for change and love or, at least, excitement. And most, if not all, of them would be disappointed. Their fate and mine was too common to be the stuff of tragedy.
And do I even have it in me? I wondered, as Sir Edward pulled me close, smothering me against his chest.
Could I risk failure, rejection, and indifference?
Imbue our tale with dignity?
Live it over and over, line by line, and word for word?
And what fresh agony, to suffer through it all again, and find: I was not clever enough; I was not good enough; I was not Charlotte.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I WAS ALONE IN my Brooklyn apartment when I discovered Lydia Robinson, although she wasn’t named.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the first great Brontë biography, had been on my bookshelf and “to read” list for an embarrassingly long time. While studying for my master’s in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Oxford, I’d seen this biography cited time and again for its importance in establishing the “Brontë Myth.” I’d just shipped my books across the Atlantic and made a promise to myself: It was time to read what I should have read then.
Near the end of volume 1, I found Lydia and Branwell, introduced by Gaskell with the (now very apt) sentence, “The story must be told.” What followed was a cutting character assassination. The wife of Branwell’s employer was described as a “wretched woman, who not only survives, but passes about in the gay circles of London society, as a vivacious, well-dressed, flourishing widow.” She was “bold and hardened,” a “profligate woman, who had tempted [Branwell] into the deep disgrace of deadly crime.” She had even “made love” to him in the presence of her children.