Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre: some 'coincidences' revisited

The 'coincidence' of Charlotte Brontë's childhood obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and the subsequent appearance in her life of Arthur Bell Nichols was first mentioned in an article about being careful what you dwell on and again in an article featuring Jean Rhys.  

Another 'coincidence' in Charlotte Brontë's life that is worth highlighting and was also mentioned earlier is her accident involving a horse that echoes something that happened in Jane Eyre, which was published seven years before the event. 

Other people have noticed these connections. While they may assume that they are just interesting, but not particularly significant, coincidences, I thought at the time that certain unseen influences were at work, and I still think so.

Many years have passed since I first mentioned these two 'coincidences'. Since then, I have come across other examples of such coincidences and accidents. 

Something I recently read in Carole Angier's biography of Jean Rhys inspired me to take another look at the two incidents involving horses in the light of some of the later discoveries and produce an updated and enhanced version of events and my ideas about them.

Jane Eyre and the horse incident
The incident involving Jane Eyre and a horse occurs when she first encounters Mr Rochester. 

On the way to post a letter on a freezing winter's day, she sits on a stile for a while. She hears the sound of approaching hooves, then Mr Rochester comes into view on his black horse. Just as they are passing her, the horse slips on the ice and comes crashing down. Mr Rochester is hurt, so he asks Jane to catch the horse for him. This is not an easy task:

“I...went up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet.”

From Jane Eyre

Yet more about Stella Gibbons's My American

Amy Lee's story has been told and the writing, money and envy elements in Stella Gibbons's My American covered; now there is some amusing material, an unexpected connection and yet another unconvincing element to be commented on. 

I find this very funny:

“It was May Day, and Mrs. Beeding was indignant because on her way out to buy sausages she had been held up by a procession of Communists and on her way back from buying sausages she had been held up by a procession of Fascists.”

Such processions were very common in London in the years leading up to World War II. 

Demands to join in

I know from experience how unpleasant it is to be pestered to say something or do something or go somewhere by someone who just cannot keep quiet or sit still and must have company at all times, but the descriptions of the young Mona Beeding's unwelcome, sometimes unbearable, demands do have their funny side in addition to being very painful to read because of the memories they stir up.

Amy's first evening with the Beeding family after her father's death slowly turns into a nightmare:

“Only Mona was left, a bored and ever-present peril to the occupied, lounging round the room, picking up things and dropping them again, putting on the headphones and taking them off, interrupting Baby’s game, saying at intervals she wished she hadn’t finished her knitting.

Charlotte Brontë and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone (1919) ends with the arrival in New York of her autobiographical character Sarah Brown, who is ill, alone and penniless.

This scene in the book is my idea of a nightmare scenario.

Stella Benson put something of her own experience into the New York episode. She travelled by ship to America in July 1917. She had more in the way of resources than Sarah Brown did, but it was still an ordeal. Approaching New York Harbour, she was:

“...sick with excitement and fright at such an unknown day before me.”

She wrote in her diary on the evening of her first day in New York:

“I never wish for a more wretched thirty hours than this last.”

She was so overcome by loneliness, confusion and the great heat that she started to cry. She awoke the next morning from dreams of death and despair.

The Living Alone scenario and others from Stella Benson’s life sound familiar; they remind me of other writers’ accounts of permutations of isolation, desperation, dangerous situations, going into the unknown, lack of resources and dreadful inner states.

The many common elements make me wonder whether these scenarios are engineered, perhaps subconsciously or perhaps by sinister unseen influences.

Some of Charlotte Brontë’s writings are of particular interest here; they say to me that she knew the terrible feelings well and had experienced a few nightmare scenarios of her own.

Today is Charlotte Brontë’s birthday

Charlotte Brontë was born in Yorkshire 202 years ago today.

She came into this world on April 21st 1816, in Thornton in Yorkshire.

She appears in many articles on this blog, as both her novels and her life are of great interest and relevance. Innumerable articles and reviews and some biographies were already in existence, but the unseen influences and connections that I detected have inspired some original material.

To mark the occasion, here is a quotation from Villette that I particularly like because it mentions London:

"I did well to come," I said ... "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?"

She also mentions St. Paul’s Cathedral in a descriptive paragraph that reminds me of the essence of London near the river on a fine spring morning:

“Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning. Finding myself before St. Paul's, I went in; I mounted to the dome: I saw thence London, with its river, and its bridges, and its churches; I saw antique Westminster, and the green Temple Gardens, with sun upon them, and a glad, blue sky, of early spring above; and between them and it, not too dense, a cloud of haze.”

St. Paul’s with Victorian visitors in 1848, a year in which Charlotte and Anne Brontë visited London together:

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.

Unseen crimes: an introduction

It is now quite common to hear people use expressions such as 'dysfunctional family' and 'control freak'. Energy vampires (people not appliances) are following the same path towards general recognition: there is a lot of useful information about them available in books and online.

It is now the turn of unseen crimes to go public. These are not crimes in the legal sense; they are committed by people who operate from another dimension in such a way that their activities cannot be detected or linked to the perpetrator. 

Such crimes are the hidden cause of some runs of bad luck; they may be behind misfortunes, accidents, injuries, illnesses and even deaths. The perpetrators are usually completely unaware of what they are doing and how it affects people: they never make the connection between what has been going on in their minds and what is happening to people around them. 

Someone who did such things deliberately would be considered to be practising black magic; the people who do it unconsciously can be said to be performing psychological black magic, psychic crime or mind-power crime. The motives vary: for example, it can be done in revenge, as a punishment, in self-defence, in an attempt to influence the victim or as a pretext to approach someone.