Charlotte Brontë and the ‘Horrors of Homeless Destitution’: How Brontë’s Relationship to Haworth Illuminates the Importance of Permanent Shelter in Jane Eyre and Villette

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë is closely associated today with Haworth Parsonage. Our identification of Brontë with Haworth, however, obscures the precarity of her hold on the Parsonage. Brontë’s occupancy was predicated upon her father’s employment as the perpetual curate of Haworth, and Brontë knew she would be forced to leave upon his death. This article argues that Brontë’s precarity as clergyman’s daughter whose shelter was contingent upon his employment explains the prominence she gives in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853) to women who lack secure homes and their quests for permanent shelter. Attention to her preoccupation with permanent shelter reveals the difficulty of separating the emotional, familial and physical components of ‘home’ and allows readers to view her as writer more attuned to structural problems than scholarship emphasising her novels’ seemingly individual or class-complicit solutions sometimes recognizes.