The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Charlotte Brontë’s Beautiful and Heartbreaking Love Letters of Unrequited Affection

Four years after English novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë (April 21, 1816–March 31, 1855) turned down a suitor’s marriage proposal with her assertive yet generous masterwork of the it’s-not-you-it’s-me model, the tables turned and she found herself on the opposite end of unrequited love.

In 1842, Charlotte and her sister Emily moved to Brussels to teach English and music, respectively, in exchange for board and tuition. When their aunt died suddenly that October, the sisters had to leave the boarding school and take care of the family crisis. The following January, 28-year-old Charlotte traveled back to Brussels by herself and fell madly in love with Constantin Héger, the founder of the school and her personal tutor in French. She returned home to Haworth a year later but remained besotted with Héger — a married man with children — and began writing him letters of extraordinary emotional intensity, at times as frequently as twice a week. Héger, who barely responded, finally let his wife take over the situation. Madame Héger wrote to Brontë instructing her that she may write once every six months at most. Héger tore up Brontë’s letters, but his prudent wife fished them out of the garbage and stitched them together for preservation purposes.

In 1894, four decades after Brontë’s death, Héger’s daughter showed the recovered letters to another former pupil of her father’s, Frederika Macdonald. Originally, Macdonald advised secrecy in light of the missives’ emotional complexities, fearing that the public wouldn’t understand that the now-famous novelist’s feelings for her former tutor weren’t an “ordinary improper affection” but “a consuming sentiment burning down self-respect and self-restraint.” But the letters changed Macdonald’s own view of Brontë, infusing her previous image as a wholesome Victorian goddess of feminine domestic duty with an air of romantic recklessness — a shift that seemed significant enough in shaping posterity’s understanding of this complex woman that Héger’s own children donated the four surviving letters to the British Library in 1913, seven decades after Brontë had penned them.

They were published in The Times on July 29 of that year and were eventually included in the British Library’s altogether delectable volume Love Letters: 2,000 Years of Romance (public library), which also features passionate missives by Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, and Henry VIII.

Page from Charlotte Brontë’s letter to Constantin Héger (British Library)

In a letter to Héger from early January of 1845, 29-year-old Brontë relays her deep disappointment of finding no mail from him and writes:

I said to myself, what I would say to someone else in such a case: “You will have to resign yourself to the fact, and above all, not distress yourself about a misfortune that you have not deserved.” I did my utmost not to cry not to complain —

But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip — one’s faculties rise in revolt — and one pays for outward calm with an almost unbearable inner struggle.

Day and night I find neither rest nor peace — if I sleep I have tormenting dreams in which I see you always severe, always saturnine and angry with me —

Forgive me then Monsieur if I take the step of writing you again — How can I bear my life unless I make an effort to alleviate its suffering?

Despite the lucid awareness that Héger would likely “lose patience” with her for writing the letter, which she even acknowledges in the letter itself, Brontë is gripped with the all-consuming mania familiar to those whose composed ordinary selves have ever been colonized by the psychic parasite of extraordinary infatuation. She implores:

I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to all kinds of reproaches — all I know — is that I cannot — that I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master’s friendship — I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains than have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope — if he gives me a little friendship — a very little — I shall be content — happy, I would have a motive for living — for working.

Illustration from ‘Jane, the Fox and Me,’ a graphic novel inspired by Jane Eyre. Click image for more.

That Brontë voices the pitiful internal bargaining of those desperate with desire is only, perhaps, to her credit — to stand by one’s feelings with such openhearted vulnerability even in the face of clear and imminent rejection is one of the greatest acts of courage:

Monsieur, the poor do not need a great deal to live on — they ask only the crumbs of bread which fall from the rich man’s table — but if they are refused these crumbs — they die of hunger — No more do I need a great deal of affection from those I love — I would not know what to do with a whole and complete friendship — I am not accustomed to it — but you showed a little interest in me in days gone by when I was your pupil in Brussels — and I cling to the preservation of this little interest — I cling to it as I would cling on to life.

In accordance with our pathological allergy to uncertainty — the same strange psychology that leads those awaiting a diagnosis to almost prefer bad news to no news — she beseeches:

Perhaps you will say to me — “I no longer take the slightest interest in you Miss Charlotte — you no longer belong to my household — I have forgotten you.”

Well Monsieur tell me so candidly — it will be a shock to me — that doesn’t matter — it will still be less horrible than uncertainty.

She ends with a plea for sympathy disguised as a damning admonition — perhaps to Héger’s wife, who ultimately handled the letters, and perhaps in part to posterity, to those of us reading her heart today:

I don’t want to reread this letter — I am sending it as I have written it — Nevertheless I am as it were dimly aware that there are some cold and rational people who would say on reading it — “she is raving” — My sole revenge is to wish these people — a single day of the torments that I have suffered for eight months — then we should see whether they wouldn’t be raving too.

One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one’s words much.

The following year, the Brontë sisters self-published their pseudonymous joint collection of poems that catapulted them into literary stardom and Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre — one of the greatest novels of all time, which centers on a young woman’s sincere love for a man set to marry someone else; in the novel, unlike in Brontë’s own life, once the otherwise rational and collected heroine professes her love in an openhearted declaration, the byronic hero forsakes his romantic commitment to the other woman and proposes marriage to Jane.

For more beautifully heartbreaking love letters, see those from Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer and Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, then restore your faith in requited love with the passionate correspondence of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and Vladimir and Véra Nabokov.


Published April 21, 2015

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/04/21/charlotte-bronte-love-letters-heger/

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