Blackmail, intrigue, lust and murder--sensational! read all about it!
Written: Jun 12 '05 (Updated Oct 31 '06)
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Pros: it's about the Brontes; points an accusing finger at the intriguing Arthur Bell Nicholls
Cons: superhuman effort required to suspend disbelief; many assertions offensive to most right-minded people
The Bottom Line: a sensational revisionist account of the life of the Brontes, based on circumstantial evidence
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| jc_hall's Full Review: James Tully - The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte: The ... |
I tend to choose my reading matter quite carefully, so it’s not often I feel like chucking a book across the room, but I came close to doing so with this one. In fact, after one particularly ridiculous assertion by the author, I put the book down, determined not to continue with it. However, my curiosity got the better of me, and I picked it up again after a couple of days and read it to the bitter end. All the better to write a fair review, or so I hope.
I read Wuthering Heights as a young girl and for many years considered it one of the most romantic novels of all time. Later in life, I sought out and admired Emily Bronte’s poems. I also had a passing interest in the works of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne. Like most Bronte fans, I read what little was known about their lives at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, England, in the mid 1800s. I’m aware that the siblings died young. Brother Branwell, a talented ne’er-do-well, drank himself into an early grave, followed within months by Emily and then Anne, both of whom were thought to have died of consumption (tuberculosis), not a rare disease in that era and blamed in part on the unsanitary conditions rampant at that time. As for Charlotte, she was thought to have died of a wasting disease a few years later. However, their widowed father, who resided in the same house, lived to a ripe old age, unsanitary conditions notwithstanding.
So, when ‘noted criminologist’ James Tully, author of ‘The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte’, claims that Charlotte Brontė helped her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, murder her talented siblings, I was more than a little intrigued. After all, Nicholls was an intriguing character. Charlotte actually had a pre-nup drawn up before their marriage to safeguard her literary earnings, a rare occurrence in a day and age when husbands routinely took over their wives’ assets upon marriage. An outsider (an Irishman of Scottish descent), Nicholls lived on at Haworth Parsonage after the death of Charlotte until her father passed away six years later, even though it was common knowledge that the two men did not get along, the old man having been vehemently and outspokenly opposed to his daughter’s marriage to this upstart. If Nicholls had been angling for Mr Bronte’s job, he was disappointed, being refused it by the Church Trustees upon Mr Bronte’s death, whereupon he took much of Charlotte’s belongings with him back to Ireland where he set himself up as a gentleman farmer, a state of affairs that could not have happened if Charlotte had not changed her will in his favour shortly before she died.
Charlotte’s correspondence with her friends is well-documented, and from what I have read, neither Charlotte nor Nicholls has ever appealed to me as sympathetic characters. But whereas I could conceive of Nicholls harbouring ulterior motives in wedding Charlotte, I cannot bring myself to accept that the author of Jane Eyre (a heroine who may be plain but far from simple) would willingly aid and abet her lover as he does away with her siblings one by one. And if she did, would she then be so stupid as to marry him and lay uncomplaining as he proceeded to poison her in turn? That simply defies belief and even the suspension of disbelief required to read an admittedly fictitious account.
Tully would have us believe that Haworth Parsonage was a centre of blackmail and intrigue, lust and murder. As ‘a criminologist with a specialist knowledge of 19th century poisons’,he even suggests a poison Nicholls could have used. While I can certainly entertain the notion of Nicholls as a sinister scoundrel on the make, I find it inconceivable to have any of the Brontes implicated, either as his accomplice or a not-too-bright bystander.
So when did I feel moved to chuck the book across the room? Well, I huffed and puffed and stopped reading for days when Tully made the slanderous assertion that Nicholls had an affair with Emily Bronte that resulted in her becoming pregnant. That was hugely, hugely, offensive to me. But most offensive of all was when he claimed that Nicholls had a hand in the sisters’ work and that Wuthering Heights was in fact Branwell’s creation and stolen by Emily! My indignation at that knew no bounds!
In an interview, Tully made this very telling statement: "I find it very coincidental that three women in their late 20s with very little formal education should each write a bestselling book in the same year that the handsome young curate arrives, and that within nine months all three are dead."
Ah…so now all is clear to me. Three YOUNG WOMEN with very little FORMAL education could not possibly have written bestselling novels. Never mind that the Bronte sisters were talented and had from a young age been voracious and eclectic readers, numbering among their favourite authors Sir Walter Scott, one of the most highly-regarded romantic poets and novelists of all time.
One of the questions posed on the back cover of this novel is this: ‘How did three sisters in a remote parsonage know so much about the darker passions of love?’ How? IMAGINATION, how else! How did Tully think any writer gets inspired to write? If all writers have to experience all that they write about, there will be a huge dearth of novels of all genres, not least science fiction and fantasy. One would think that he of all people, building a novel of sorts upon a flimsy pack of conjecture and half-baked truths, would at least recognize imagination and give it its due. Sad to say, Tully is one more hack attempting to profit from the true talents of his famed subjects by the use of sensationalism, and a misogynistic one at that.
Tully had in fact tried to publish a non-fiction version of what is essentially a tissue of fabrication, but this was--surprise, surprise--unanimously rejected by publishers. Bob Bannard of the Brontė Society dismisses his fictional account as nonsense. "It has no basis in fact whatsoever. There's no one in the world, not even Mr James Tully himself, I suspect, who really believes that Charlotte Brontė poisoned one of her sisters, was the accessory to the poisoning of the rest and eventually got poisoned herself," he says.
To be fair, it has to be said that this book is readable, though that’s not to say that it has much merit. Still, if you can stomach the ridiculous and scandalous assertions regarding the Bronte clan, and if you’re a die-hard Bronte fan who’s read all there is to read about the Brontes, then read this for the very real possibility that Arthur Bell Nicholls played a sinister role in the life and deaths of the Brontes. And yes, the narrator, Martha Brown, daughter of John Brown, Mr Bronte’s sexton, was a real person. Using her as the narrator was probably the only sensible thing Tully did. Nicholls did indeed take her with him to Ireland when he left Haworth for good. Taking that into account and with all that’s known of Nicholls’ life (and the facts that he lived in John Brown’s house and Martha was a maid at the parsonage), this is surely significant. I only wish Tully could have made his point about Nicholls without slandering the Brontes in the process. But I guess there's just not as much cachet to 'The Crimes of Arthur Bell Nicholls'.
Recommended:
No
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jc_hall
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Member: JC Hall
Location: Toronto, Canada
Reviews written: 199
Trusted by: 53 members
About Me:
Going back to Vancouver for Christmas! Happy Holidays, everyone!!
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