Here’s a scene from Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Mr Hattersley, his face purple, his laughter manic, has Lord Lowborough by the arm and is trying to drag him out of the drawing room. Lowborough is a reformed alcoholic. He struggles, pale with anger, to resist Hattersley’s proclaimed intent to make him drunk again. Getting hold of a candle, he burns Hattersley’s hands with it. The latter lets go, “roaring like a wild beast”, and collapses on to an ottoman from which he taunts and threatens his miserable wife, eventually staggering to his feet to knock her down.
Anne Brontë’s stature as a novelist would probably have been more readily recognised had she been born into another family, not only because she had two of English fiction’s most enduringly popular authors as in-house competitors, but because one of them did her utmost – out of a well-founded fear of public opprobrium – to downplay Anne’s achievement. After Anne’s death, Charlotte Brontë refused to sanction a third edition of Wildfell Hall. Its shocking subject matter was inconsistent, said Charlotte, with Anne’s “naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature”.
In this sprightly book, Samantha Ellis sets out to give Anne her due. Ellis is a practitioner of a new genre – chick-lit-crit. In her previous book, How to Be a Heroine, she mashed up literary criticism with an essay on self-help. In Take Courage, she mixes her own story in with Anne’s. As she begins, Ellis is single, going on 40, prone to seizures and anxious about all three conditions. By the end, she’s marrying a good man and feeling because “there’s nothing that can soften this. Nothing. She didn’t even make 30.” But Anne’s sad ending is balanced by her own happy one. “Take courage” were Anne’s last words. Ellis comes away uplifted.
She uses the vocabulary of popular journalism: “eye-watering”; “phenomenal”; “achingly fashionable”. She is given to speculation – the words “Anne must have” recur – but Ellis has done her research. She starts off acting wide eyed but soon she is giving us sensational and pertinent extracts from the writings of William Carus Wilson, the founder of the school in which the two eldest Brontë girls died. She demonstrates that the mournful sequence of Brontë deaths is an instance of a ghastly historical reality (the average life expectancy in Haworth in Anne’s lifetime was 26) and material for the maudlin contemporary cult of the happy deathbed. “Anne didn’t want to die,” writes Ellis. “Of course she didn’t.” Her indignation is salutary.
She structures her story character by character, a way of coming at Anne from all angles. Mother Maria Brontë (née Branwell), who died before Anne was two, comes first and allows Ellis to think about maternity. Tabby the housekeeper brings in the moorland: its beauties, dangers and its folklore. Sister Emily is the trigger for a consideration of creativity; her father, Patrick, for a tribute to Anne’s urge towards activism. It’s a sound structure and it allows Ellis to give the Brontë story – well worn to the point of being worn out – a fresh turn.
Ellis grew up longing for Heathcliff, she confesses, but came to her senses eventually. As for Heathcliff’s creator, Ellis relishes Branwell’s childish fantasy of Emily as a “gurt bellaring bull” who has a tantrum and is straitjacketed and put to bed. She is sceptical of romanticism. “Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils,” wrote Charlotte. Ellis asks what kind of a liberty it was that made it so traumatic for Emily ever to leave home.
Ellis’s range of reference is eclectic. She alludes to Kate Bush and Cold Comfort Farm, but she is also interested in the theology of William Cowper’s poetry. She knows what happens when a bog bursts and why. She puts Patrick Brontë’s life story in the context of contemporary anti-Irish racist stereotyping: when his son, Branwell, was drinking himself stupid in the Haworth pub, he seemed to its other regulars not a romantically self-tormenting rake, but just another drunken Paddy.
Ellis is funny about her own naivety, but she does the hard work of textual analysis and archival research. She has read the papers of the numerous Brontë scholars who have picked over every relic at Haworth. She is grateful for their assiduity, but she doesn’t overvalue it: “Can you really judge a person by their teapot?”
She is combative on Anne’s behalf. As her champion, she identifies Charlotte as her opponent. Anne died at the age of 29. Charlotte lived another six years, during which she changed her youngest sister’s poems, disparaged her novels (“Wildfell Hall, it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve”) and belittled her personally. Anne lived, wrote Charlotte, “in the shade”, covered “with a sort of nun-like veil”. Ellis argues that it was Charlotte who cast the shade and drew the veil.
Anne was the first of the sisters to write about being a governess and the first to have two books out. When her unscrupulous publisher tried to pass The Tenant of Wildfell Hall off as being by the author of the better-selling Jane Eyre, Charlotte and Anne went to London (Anne’s only visit) to set things straight. Charlotte was concerned to distance herself from Anne’s book, which was already being described as “morbid, coarse and repulsive”. Anne, braver and more honest, in Ellis’s view, wanted to lay claim to it.
Anne dies. Ellis’s boyfriend proposes to her at a Björk concert where “everyone is dressed up as pirates and mermaids and jellyfish”. There is something of the jolly vicars about all this. I’m thinking of the irritating kind of cleric who, unable to trust the congregation to respond to the grave beauty of the liturgy, keeps interrupting it to explain what’s going on or to throw in some jokily banal anecdote to reassure anyone scared off by seriousness. But Ellis is cleverer than she lets on. She says she’s longed to have sisters “to sing into a hairbrushes with, to talk boys with”. Actually, she would probably have talked books with them and the conversation would have been sharp witted and well informed.
• Take Courage by Samantha Ellis is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
