Charlotte Bronte's gloves, a pair of neatly stitched, lightly soiled, finely creased white gloves, lie alongside each other like precious ivories rescued from a vanished civilization. The gloves are remarkable for their minuteness -- they are less than half as broad as a modern female hand, and their fingers are scarcely thicker than a pencil -- but much more so for their association: these few inches of kid once covered the hand that held the pen that wrote "Jane Eyre." These gloves so vividly and so hauntingly summon the novelist that a visitor is inescapably drawn to examine them.

Charlotte Bronte's hands hold a special place in her psychology. They were the one physical feature the writer exempted from what she described as her "almost repulsive" plainness. It is usually assumed that they pleased Charlotte because of their size and their delicacy, but perhaps Charlotte was proud of her hands for another reason.


Charlotte's hands were the instrument, fed by her vigorous imagination, that produced the famous juvenilia that enlivened the unusual Yorkshire childhood Charlotte shared with her siblings Branwell, Emily and Anne. Her hands also fashioned the fiction that defined Charlotte in her maturity, and they were responsible for the correspondence that connected her to worlds beyond her father's parsonage at Haworth, where she lived her whole life. Charlotte's hands were her liberators; they lifted her to fame and a measure of happiness.




Branwell is remembered as the colossal failure...but in his works a different Branwell is seen. Branwell's early talent and leadership among the children is evident here. It was he who, upon receiving a gift of toy soldiers from his father, invented the kingdoms of Verdopolis and Angria, which occupied his and Charlotte's imaginations for so many years, and inspired Emily and Anne's parallel fantasy world, Gondal. In handwriting even stupefyingly smaller than Charlotte's, Branwell recounted one of Angria's many battles in a fragment from 1835. In another tiny manuscript, Branwell wages a different battle, this time with Charles Wellesley, one of Charlotte's early pseudonyms, whom he calls a "little reptile" and accuses of vomiting "forth a dose of scandal and self importance."
The Brontes' sibling rivalry enlivens the early stories. Far from mild herself, Charlotte takes on Branwell in one of her handmade Lilliputian books, which contains her play "The Poetaster." In it, Charlotte argues for methodical composition and careful revision against Branwell's predilection for poetry that is spontaneously inspired. Branwell and Charlotte stand off visually, too, in drawings of Alexander Percy, the hero of Branwell's juvenilia, and Arthur Wellesley, the hero of Charlotte's. In one of his many quests for a respectable career, Branwell once set up in Bradford as a portrait painter. When working in pen and ink, he sketched the prospect of his own imminent death. A skeleton, assuming the attitude of a boxer, comes to challenge the naked bedridden artist to a match. The Heathcliffian, death-seeking Branwell of legend in fact depicts himself resisting , his head straining away from the skeleton, his eyes resolutely shut. Death came for him anyway. Charlotte writes on Oct. 28, 1848, "I do not weep from a sense of bereavement -- there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost -- but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light." "My poor father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters,"

The Girls

As much as it may have isolated them, Haworth remained a source of strength for the Bronte sisters. There is a telling image, conveyed first by Mrs. Gaskell, of Charlotte, Emily and Anne writing together at the dining table, then standing up and walking in circles around it. As they walked, they read and discussed their work, as well as their hopes for the future. From this circle, they evidently drew much courage.

These children of nature were in truth savy, hard-working and highly disciplined writers, but the truth has not often mattered to their admirers. Readers often want their writers to embody their fiction, and Bronte fans have demanded a large portion of romance from their heroines, preferring to see them as untamed spirits who wandered the blustery Haworth moors, spilling over with uncontrollable passion in their works.

The Bronte craze began just after Charlotte's death, with some pilgrims visiting the parsonage while her father and widower still lived there and others asking for mementos of the lost ladies of genius.

But how can it be helped....I TOO HAVE VISITED BRONTE COUNTRY AND FELT THE SPIRIT OF THE PLACE GO THROUGH AND THROUGH ME AND JUST OUT OF SIGHT, THOUGH ALL PRESENT, THE BRONTE SISTERS.....CHARLOTTE WITH HER TINY HANDS AND HUGE IMAGINATIVE WILL....EMILY WITH HER MANLY STRIDE AND WILD ELUSIVE AND SCORNFUL LAUGHTER......ANNE WITH HER ARDENT AND FAITHFUL SOUL....AND LITTLE, PLUCKY< DARING< FLAMBOYANT AND TRAGIC BRANWELL.......