The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë

Foreword

The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë has always been the least successful of Daphne du Maurier's books in commercial terms; yet it remains as fascinating as the best of her work. When it came out in 1960, her publisher, Victor Gollancz, printed eight thousand copies—far less than was usual for his best-selling author; and though it received several good reviews (including one from Muriel Spark in the Daily Telegraph), the biography did not sell well, perhaps because it was so different to her more popular novels and family memoirs. This failure continued to be a source of disappointment to du Maurier: in a letter to her friend, Oriel Malet, written in October 1962, she referred to the painfulness of seeing a book that 'just gets wiped off and forgotten, no matter how good the reviews. I don't think I had any bad reviews for my Branwell, but right from the start I know old V.G. was bored by the thought of it, and he never made any effort to push it after it was published.'

That her carefully researched biography had been intended to rescue Branwell Brontë from obscurity made its lack of sales all the more maddening. As du Maurier writes in her preface, she had sought to bring 'some measure of understanding for a figure long maligned, neglected and despised'—and yet her mission to rehabilitate Branwell, the reprobate brother labelled as the drunken flop of the Brontë family, was itself thwarted.

Failure, of course, is an intriguing subject; not least for du Maurier herself. By the time she embarked upon her Branwell project, she was a famous author—Rebecca had not stopped selling since its instant success upon publication in 1938—yet she was not immune to insecurities. In a letter to the Brontë scholar, J. A. Symington, who helped her with her research, she expressed her fears at being out-done by another writer, Winifred Gérin, who turned out also to be working on a Branwell biography at the same time as du Maurier. 'My novels are what is known as popular and sell very well,' she wrote to Symington, soon after she heard the news of the Gérin book, 'but I am not a critic's favourite, indeed I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller and not reviewed at all, so… I would come off second-best, I have no illusions to that.'

It was not the first time that she had felt herself to have been relegated as second-best: unkind critics had already deemed Rebecca an inferior Jane Eyre; which must have been galling, given how much she admired the Brontës, having been a passionate reader of their novels since childhood. Oriel Malet reveals in her book, Letters from Menabilly, that she and Daphne talked endlessly about the Brontës—and about their imaginary worlds of childhood:

When du Maurier was asked to write the introduction to a new edition of Wuthering Heights in 1954, she used it as an opportunity to visit Haworth, and asked Oriel Malet to accompany her and her younger daughter Flavia on the trip. The three of them spent time exploring the Brontë Parsonage, and went for long walks across the moors; and as Malet writes in Letters from Menabilly, du Maurier 'was becoming increasingly intrigued by Branwell (the son, predictably, interesting her more than the daughters).'

It was an astute observation: for du Maurier had always been more absorbed in her son, Kits, than her two daughters (despite the fact that she became closer to the girls as they grew up, and was adored by both of them). After the trip to Haworth, she read all of the Brontë juvenilia, and became convinced that Branwell had not received the credit he was due, from Mrs Gaskell's first, enduring biography of Charlotte Brontë, and thereafter. To that end, she wrote to J. A. Symington, one of the two editors of the juvenilia (and much else besides), saying that she was 'fascinated by Branwell and I cannot understand why Brontë research has neglected him'. Symington responded enthusiastically and du Maurier decided to embark on a serious, scholarly study of Branwell—a book that would be quite unlike any she had written before; a work, perhaps, that she hoped would be taken seriously by previously dismissive literary critics.

Margaret Forster's insightful biography of Daphne du Maurier makes it clear how important this project was:

And there were other reasons, too, for her fascination with Branwell. She had embarked on her research not long after her husband, Sir Frederick Browning—known to his family as Tommy—had suffered a nervous breakdown, in July 1957, a collapse exacerbated by exhaustion and alcohol consumption. By the beginning of 1958, as Margaret Forster writes, Daphne herself was also 'a little unbalanced'. Some of her fears concerned Tommy's position—he was a distinguished military commander who went on to work for the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace:

Her fears extended to Oriel Malet, by then living in Paris: 'She rang me several times, warning me not to go out at night alone, and to avoid all public places, such as the metro…'

Thus du Maurier was to write with perceptive sympathy of Branwell's breakdowns, of 'the waves of depression that engulfed him' and 'the shock to his own pride' when he, 'the brilliant versatile genius of the family', was unable to sell his paintings or publish his books. But she was also able to empathise with Charlotte's distress and irritation at her brother's slump, made worse by his drinking (du Maurier, after all, had by then nicknamed her husband 'Moper'). She quotes one of Charlotte's letters at length, written to a close friend when Branwell had come home in disgrace after losing his job as a tutor, and distracting his sister from her manuscript of The Professor:

Du Maurier clearly identified with Charlotte's feelings of disillusionment and frustration: as is apparent in her letter to Symington, explaining why she had been unable to spend more time looking at manuscripts in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, because of Tommy's ill health. 'I have been in constant attendance on my husband,' she wrote, 'I feel rather like Charlotte Brontë when nursing the Rev. Brontë and finding it difficult to get on with Villette.' And she imagined Winifred Gérin, meanwhile, speeding ahead with her biography, unimpeded by moping men.

Nevertheless, towards the end of 1959, with Tommy well enough to be left, at last, she returned to Haworth, and hunted through manuscripts and church records. Du Maurier's investigations there contributed to the novel idea, expressed in her book, that Branwell had been dismissed as a tutor from the Robinson family not, as has been commonly held, because of an affair with Mrs Robinson, but some gross impropriety with her son Edmund, Branwell's pupil. ('It is possible that, left alone at Thorp Green with Edmund, and free from the constraining presence of his employer, he had attempted in some way to lead Edmund astray…') Subsequent Brontë scholars have pointed out that this has more to do with du Maurier's imaginative reworking of history than any factual evidence; and it would have made an intriguing fictional plot. But as it was, she seemed to be losing interest in her idea of Branwell as an unrecognised genius; certainly by Chapter Thirteen, when she quoted the opening lines of his poem, 'Real Rest', written when he returned home to the Parsonage in disgrace ('I see a corpse upon the waters lie, / With eyes turned, swelled and sightless, to the sky, / And arms outstretched to move, as wave on wave / Upbears it in its boundless billowy grave…'). The remaining lines of this poem, she then declared, 'are better left unquoted. Fantasy and laudanum were rapidly destroying what creative powers were still within him.'

For all that, du Maurier's own sustained efforts and creative powers ensured that she beat her rival to the finishing post: The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë came out eight months before Gérin's book. But by then, du Maurier was already feeling oppressed by another rival writer: in October 1960, just before publication, she wrote to Oriel Malet, 'I see Nancy Mitford has written a book called Don't Tell Alfred, and I bet it gets rave notices. It comes out the same week as poor Branwell, who will be chucked.'

Poor Branwell; poor Daphne. To be truthful, although I would recommend her biography of him as essential reading to any du Maurier fan, it is not the easiest of her work—weighed down, occasionally, by her anxious diligence, and also by her own increasing exasperation with Branwell's failure to live up to his original promise. At the same time, she seemed almost to admit to the impossibility of ever knowing the real truth of another's life; least of all her Branwell. As she wrote in a letter to Oriel Malet, in December 1959, it was hard to get people in Haworth to talk about the facts of the past, when they so easily wandered into the irrelevant events of the present:

Yet her biography had served its purpose, in that Branwell came vividly alive within it; and in doing so, du Maurier seemed able to write her way out of her despair, to see a future for herself and for her husband. Tommy recovered, and their marriage was ended only by his death in 1965. She lived on for many years, until 1989, and though she did not go back to Haworth, she returned often to the Brontës, and to Gondal, the sustaining landscape of the imagination.

Close to the end of her life, when she had finally stopped writing, and needed nursing at home, one of those who cared for her was a woman named Margaret Robertson, who came from Yorkshire. Robertson discovered that the Brontës were one of the few remaining topics of conversation that would spark du Maurier into animation; indeed, she would happily talk about their novels, while denying writing some of her own. The nurse, who had some psychiatric training, came to the conclusion that 'Daphne acted towards her writing past as though it were a person who had died—she was bereaved and the grief of her loss was too terrible to talk about…' Talking about the Brontës, however, was the best therapy; and in that, Daphne du Maurier remained entirely true to herself.

Justine Picardie, 2005