What fascinated me was the gender reversal Gaskell drew readers’ attention to. In this case, “the man became the victim,” she wrote, equating the alcoholic, opium addict Branwell with the naive (and eventually ruined) maidens we find in many Victorian novels. Ultimately she suggested that the unnamed Lydia was responsible not only for Branwell’s demise but for all the Brontë siblings’ premature deaths.
I closed the book and, buzzing, turned to my laptop. My first “research” was chaotic. I found Gaskell had retracted her allegations and removed them from future editions, after being contacted by Lydia Robinson’s (now Lady Scott’s) lawyers. I’d been lucky that my second-hand paperback had been based on the original version. There was scholarly debate about whether the affair had happened at all. But most important, I learned that no one else had written the novel I was aching to write—no one else had even suggested that the affair could have happened without Lydia being the adulterous monster Gaskell made her out to be.
I had my project. I’d write a novel inspired by the themes of the work of the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte—women’s lack of choices, a feeling of being trapped, passion bubbling beneath the surface—but my novel would have a heroine that a Brontë novel hadn’t seen before: older, richer, and sexually experienced, with children of her own.
So began two years of research and writing that transformed my apartment into a murder detective’s bulletin board and, later, took me home to the UK to search for traces of Lydia in the country I’d left behind.
CONFESSIONS
So, what’s true? I’m going to approach this a little differently with a series of confessions about what’s not.
First, on the use of original texts. None of the letters in the novel are real. However, Branwell’s poems in Chapter 3 and in the letters dated 1st August 1845 and 2nd June 1846 are his. Anne Brontë’s characterization of Lydia in the letter referenced in Chapter 1 is from her novel Agnes Grey (1847), which I also quote in the Epilogue. Charlotte Brontë’s dialogue in Chapter 10 borrows a line (“There’s little joy in life for me”) from her devastating poem “On the Death of Anne Brontë” (1849), which she wrote in response to her youngest sister’s death. Lydia also paraphrases one of the most famous passages in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in the same chapter, in her impassioned speech to her daughter Mary. Lydia says, “We have as much passion as men do and full as much heart,” and Jane, “I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!” In Chapter 19, Lydia fears that Charlotte and Sir Edward’s wife will set fire to her bed, evoking Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic,” in Charlotte’s most famous novel.
Meanwhile, Branwell’s question to Lydia in Chapter 3—“Have you never felt that there is, or ought to be, something of you beyond you?”—is indebted to Cathy’s famous plea to Nelly in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847): “I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you.” And Lydia’s fear of being haunted by Edmund and Catherine in Chapter 20 mirrors the narrator Lockwood’s paranormal experiences when sleeping at Wuthering Heights.
Eighteen letters written by Lydia to her business agent in 1847 and 1848 survive in the archives at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. From these I took her sign-off, “Yours very truly,” in the letters from her throughout my novel.
Second, there is no evidence the Robinson family owned a horse named Patroclus, but every other character in my novel, whether human or animal, is real. I started with secondary accounts—including biographies of the Brontës by Lynne Reed Banks, Juliet Barker, Edward Chitham, Daphne du Maurier, and more—but soon moved on to primary sources.
Digitized census records were key for understanding the Robinsons, their servants, and their neighbors and led to my solving many mysteries. I discovered, for instance, that the Sewells—assumed to be husband and wife by other Brontë enthusiasts, including Daphne du Maurier in her The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1961)—were in fact siblings. In my novel, for clarity, the sister is referred to as “Miss Sewell,” although as housekeeper, she was known as “Mrs.”
Supplementing the census information was an incredible and improbable resource—over sixty years of journals recording “births, marriages, deaths and sundries” in the Great and Little Ouseburn area, kept by local carpenter George Whitehead (1823–1913). These were published in 1990 as Victorian Ouseburn: George Whitehead’s Journal, thanks to the scholarship and fund-raising efforts of the late local historian Helier Hibbs and his army of volunteers. Whitehead’s blunt entries helped me establish the roles of various Thorp Green servants, not all of whom made it into the final draft of the novel (there were so many Williams and Ann[e]s). But he also at times had a flair for the dramatic. Of the younger Lydia’s elopement, for instance, he wrote: “Miss Lydia Robinson made her exit with Henry Roxby (a playactor) Monday morning, Oct 20th. They went to Gretna Green and got married that night. She was a fortnight turned 20 years that day. A bad job 1845.”
Third, there is no evidence the Robinsons were suffering from financial difficulties. I was lucky enough to be able to look through the account book mentioned in Chapters 9, 15, and 16 of my novel (this is also in the archives at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth), and the numbers seemed healthy, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on nineteenth-century finances.
Edmund’s gambling was suggested to me by his love of horses, attested by Anne Brontë’s depiction of the Murray family in Agnes Grey (1847) and by the life of Edmund and Lydia’s son, Ned. A keen hunter, Ned died at only thirty-seven years old, along with several other sportsmen, two ferrymen, and several horses, in a ferry accident at Newby Park in Yorkshire, which received attention across national and sporting press.
The family’s other problems and tragedies are all real. Georgiana died. The younger Lydia eloped. Bessy was sued for breach of promise by a Mr. Milner. But I made an assumption about which Mr. Milner, choosing the oldest of a local family with sons, despite his unfortunate name—William. Bessy went on to marry another William—William Jessop—a business connection of her uncle William Evans (keeping these Williams straight?).
There is even some slight evidence that Lydia senior had to put up with a difficult mother-in-law. In one of the letters to her agent in 1848, Lydia wrote that Elizabeth Robinson, here referred to as “grandmamma,” had been “exceedingly angry” when she tried to dismiss Tom Sewell. From this seed sprouted the animosity between Lydia, the Sewells, and Edmund’s mother, which fuels several subplots in the novel.
Fourth, there is no extant evidence about Dr. John Crosby’s sexuality. He was well loved in Great Ouseburn, as demonstrated by the beautiful and prominent memorial to him you can still read in St. Mary’s church. It concludes:
His universal kindness
Professional ability benevolent
Disposition and active usefulness
During a residence here of 30 years
Warmly endeared him
To a large circle of friends
Who deeply lament