The Moorlands: The Timeless Contemporary

Abstract

Jane Eyre and Shirley are, pre-eminently, novels of the gentler northern valleys, but Wuthering Heights inhabits, totally, a different setting. In Anne Bronte's books, too, Lindenhope and Agnes Grey's nameless moorland home are hill-top villages like Gimmerton. Like Gimmerton, they lie amid windswept wastes and have nothing in common with Wellwood, Horton Lodge, and the parklands of Grassdale Manor, nor the lush meadows of Shirley, the stately, softly-lit halls and moon-drenched orchards of Jane Eyre. In the isolated localities of their novels, Emily and Anne depict a wilder, more barren, more desolate landscape than their sister, save for Morton and its surroundings. Unlike the rapidly-developing, industrially-uneasy districts of Shirley, those of Gimmerton, Lindenhope and Morton have seen no radical social change down the centuries. In this respect, there is no perceptible difference between Anne's picture of Lindenhope in 1827, Emily's of Gimmerton some twenty-five to fifty years earlier, and Charlotte's of Morton in the first decade of the eighteen-hundreds, such as may be discerned between Charlotte Bronte's drawing of Stilbro' in Shirley and Xin The Professor, a book set at a later date. Ellen Dean's memory of all that half century past in Gimmerton, when she tells her story to Lockwood, reflects none of the dramatic changes in Mrs Pryor's vivid recall of bygone days in Briarfield Parish, before the coming of the power-looms, to Caroline Helstone. In the moorland chapters of the novels, this remoteness from the world in time as in place, is strongly emphasised. When the significance of the fictional treatment of the Brontes' milieu comes under detailed discussion, mountain isolation emerges as a dominant, recurrent theme. It was a common family experience to which the Brontes reacted individually, for isolation echoes their own secluded lives at Haworth, deriving naturally from their most constant environment, the northern hill-country that gave them inspiration. It is essential, first of all, to define precisely the moorland tract on which all the Brontes draw to varying extent in their work, discuss its very real isolation and immutability, note its limits and homogeneity. A proper appreciation of these peculiar attributes of that area, or a lack of appreciation, has an important bearing on criticism from publication of the novels to the present day. This is especially true of the question of the fusion of source-material, chiefly in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and any consideration of the attitude of the Victorian reading-public including the early critics, towards