It was discovered in 1916 by his second wife. Tuberculosis would claim Emily at 30, soon after “Wuthering Heights” appeared, and Anne at 29.įor more than a half-century the portrait sat, folded in four and deeply creased, on top of a wardrobe in the home of Arthur Bell Nicholls, the curate at Haworth whom Charlotte married nine months before her death. His life ended, at 31, in a suicidal spiral of alcohol and opium addiction. At some point, Branwell painted over his likeness, leaving a whitish pillar between himself and his sisters, almost as though he had beamed himself out of the family, “Star Trek” style. Just a few years before this low point, Branwell, an aspiring artist, painted a group portrait of the four siblings, one of the focal points of the exhibition.
The saddest document in the exhibition is a prospectus that the sisters drew up advertising a school that they hoped to run: “the Misses Brontë’s establishment for the Board and Education of a limited number of young ladies.” The number was very limited: zero. The world of work beckoned, and for single women of their class, that meant one of two professions, teacher or governess, neither of which they were suited to by talent or temperament. As the sisters entered their late teens, they faced painfully limited prospects as daughters of a humble clergyman. The childhood world of fantasy takes a somber turn at the exhibition’s wailing wall. “You are certainly jealous because a member of the feminine gender has displayed such wonderful abilities,” he begins, and goes on to praise a genius “likely to pale the ineffectual fires of her male contemporaries.” When Zenobia, a formidable intellect with similarities to her creator and to Jane Eyre, attracts the sniping criticism of a circle of males, the beguiling Marquess of Douro rises to her defense. Charlotte’s 1830 pencil portrait of Zenobia Marchioness Ellrington, one of her Glass Town characters, is accompanied by a pungent quote, reproduced on a wall of the exhibition. Nelson has come up with telling bits of counterevidence.
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