If nothing else, Jude Morgan’s literary daring in taking on the lives of the Bronte sisters as the subject of his most recent novel, The Taste of Sorrow, would have been worthy of praise. It is a story that has been written many times over, and their novels themselves are so famous that most readers have a definite image in their heads of
a remarkable family of women altogether — no “coward souls” they, who created Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Bertha, Cathy and Arthur Huntingdon; rather, they stand like titans in the imaginations of their audience: a trio of unsophisticated geniuses against a backdrop of bleak northern moors, cursed by tuberculosis and bad luck.
So Morgan had much to live up to at his writing desk, not least the shades of giants, and it is nice to be able to say that he has written a book worthy of them: a crashing good read, as well as being extremely well-written and researched. He seldom takes the path of re-invention, no doubt realising that as a template for tragedy, the Bronte plot could hardly be bettered: there were six Bronte siblings, of whom the longest-lived was Charlotte, dead at the age of 38. Two sisters, Maria and Elisabeth, died as children of illness brought on by harsh treatment at the school that became the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre; Branwell, the brilliant and promising brother, died an alcoholic; Emily and Anne were both dead of tuberculosis within nine months of him. Their father outlived them all.
But is this really a book about tragedy? Certainly it is about the great personal sorrow that informed their lives, but it is also an intelligent account of circumstance — of the social and economic limitations that the girls triumphed over before they could write anything at all, even in the privacy of their home. Morgan works backward from the Bronte oeuvre to examine what might have shaped them as writers — in Charlotte’s case, an early psychological wound. As a child, she is shown feeling comfortable “in the middle” of her siblings, always looking to the older Maria and Elisabeth for protection and guidance. When they die, she steps out after Elisabeth’s coffin “with such a feeling of stinging merciless exposure that she wanted to throw up her arms against a world… where there was no longer any middle to inhabit, only edge, brunt, naked extremity”. How well this explains what Charlotte must have felt, as a younger child suddenly promoted to being the eldest because of death. A sense of responsibility, duty and guilt (for not wanting to be responsible and dutiful) continues to haunt her for the rest of her life.
That there must have been severe conflicts within the idea of “duty” is apparent from the books that she and her sisters wrote, and the fractiousness and anger of their female characters. Morgan shows how the sisters are sacrificed to Branwell’s ambitions and their father’s wishes for years: they have to train to be governesses while Branwell tries his luck at painting and literary translation. They have no other prospects but that of earning a small income that will enable basic survival. And so, in a literary QED, the exercise of imagination — an intense, structured and detailed one — becomes their refuge and escape.
Branwell, of course, went dramatically to pieces, but Morgan is compassionate to his shadowy and discredited figure: that of a young man who crumbled under the weight of parental and familial expectation. Equally to Morgan’s credit is his portrayal of the elusive Anne — a good third of the book is seen from her point of view. Morgan turns the story of her love for Willian Weightman into one of the most interesting episodes in his book, treading a fine line between the little that is known, and inspired and convincing guesswork.
But like a skillful magician, Morgan is at his best when he spins something that we know quite well — such as that Branwell once set his bed on fire when he fell asleep while drunk — and transforms it into one of the funniest scenes of the book (to say more here would be a spoiler, except that Morgan manages to give Emily a sense of humour!).
So while I usually can’t help weeping in almost any version of the Bronte story, to my intense surprise I found myself laughing out loud here. There are other memorable details: the fact that the children had an Irish accent — Maria is mocked for it at school; and that governesses were expected to do the family sewing, and so barely had time to write letters, let alone novels.
Most of all, this book works as criticism and illumination and, after several years, I found myself picking up the Bronte poems and reading them again. Perhaps that is the best compliment to this book — the story it tells is so interesting that it turns you to the work of the Brontes once more.
Anupama Chandra is a Delhi-based film editor. She read English Literature at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and at Hertford College, University of Oxford.