Charlotte Brontë was born on this day in 1816. 

It’s also the 95^th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, who opened her historic eyes on April 21, 1926. That makes Charlotte exactly 110 years older than the queen. 

But who seems the most modern?

Every time I re-read Charlotte Brontë’s best book, Jane Eyre, I think I’m finally going to dislike it. The plot is absurd: the madwoman in the attic and thwarted love and a convenient and very symbolic housefire. Yet I always find myself carried along by its timeless story. A young woman of no great privilege makes her way through the world with unbridled intellectual and physical passion and an uncompromising sense of herself.

Hold up against that the idea of the queen, buoyed by privileged, bridled by rules, and permitted very little self at all.

So let’s celebrate Charlotte Brontë with a story set around her 200th birthday. Back then, I was reading one of the many Brontë biographies when I came across a line from a letter she’d written: “Tomorrow I shall visit Bedlam.”

It made me sit up. At the time, I was researching my novel Mad Richard, which takes its name from the British painter Richard Dadd. Richard spent most of his life in the infamous Bedlam madhouse after murdering his father. I wondered if he and Charlotte might have met.

It was a popular Victorian pastime to visit madhouses and jails, and on one of her rare stays in London, Charlotte planned a tour. The jailers and doctors at Bedlam were used to receiving middle-class visitors, often trotting out the better-behaved inmates to converse. Richard Dadd was regarded as “gentlemanly,” and was periodically introduced to visitors, Charles Dickens among them.

I got Charlotte Brontë’s Collected Letters out of the library to see what she’d written about her visit. Nothing, as it turned out. She’d planned to visit Bedlam only a couple of days before returning home to her family in Yorkshire. Whatever she’d seen–presuming she’d even gone–she must have talked about in person.

I didn’t find Brontë’s signature in the visitor’s book in the Bethlem Hospital archives, either. There are gaps in the records, and the date of her visit is among them. I even tracked down the descendants of the doctor who was supposed to have taken her. They told me that members of their family had snipped apart Charlotte’s letters to the doctor sometime during the 1890s and sold her signatures to collectors. 

Yet if there wasn’t any record of Brontë’s visit, there wasn’t any proof she hadn’t gone, either. For a novel, that was enough. Charlotte had got into my head and I wanted to write her out–especially since she was such a contrast to Richard, at least at the time. If the two had met, Charlotte was near the end of her life, and she was finally happy. At 38, she married the clergyman Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate. By all accounts it was a successful marriage, although far too short.

Charlotte became pregnant a few months after her wedding. Tragically, she died soon afterwards, three weeks shy of her 39^th birthday. She was probably suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum, an exaggerated form of morning sickness that leaves sufferers dangerously dehydrated. Her friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell later said that if she’d known in time, she would have helped end the pregnancy—a startling statement from a Victorian woman who was married to a Unitarian minister. Whether Charlotte would have let her is another question.

In honour of her birthday, here’s a passage from Mad Richard, when Charlotte meets her suitor Arthur Nicholls on the Yorkshire moors. He has walked a great distance to visit her and she is torn, since her father opposes the marriage.

*****

A sound of tramping. The nonfictional sheep disappeared over the verge, and Charlotte rose to see Mr. Nicholls scrambling downhill, favouring his right leg. She didn’t believe in his rheumatism, which hadn’t been mentioned since he’d begged off going to Australia, but naturally he would be footsore after walking forty miles. Thirty-seven. Even though he was a demon for exercise, presuming curates could be demonic.

Charlotte hated her chattering nerves and would get on top of them.

“Mr. Nicholls,” she said, composing her face into an expression of agreeable empty-headed blandness, as ladies were advised. And Charlotte was a lady, despite not being treated as one when she’d been a governess. Despite disliking the empty-headed blandness she was supposed to project, and often chose to. It was a cardinal point.

“Hullo then,” Mr. Nicholl said. “You came.”  

Beaming over her, colour high, black hair windblown, he looked like a hardy farmer. Belatedly hearing what he said, Charlotte realized that Mr. Nicholls had walked forty miles without being certain she would meet him.

“Am I unreliable?” she asked. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

He agreed, but she was back in a memory of early days, rainy, sheltered in the parsonage, when Branwell had passed on tags of the Latin and Greek their father taught him. It makes me a gentleman, he said. And me a lady? The question always cardinal. Not if you let on you know Latin, Branny said, leaning heavily on her shoulder as she copied, a delicious weight of warm boy. 

Charlotte didn’t know why this particular memory had rumbled in over so many others. Mr. Nicholl was nothing like her brother, either when Branwell was young and good or later, after he had over-ripened. Then she caught a glimpse: My brother is the reason I like boyish men, she thought, before they spoil. Helpless before George Smith, his leg slung over the arm of a chair. Her professor, M. Héger, blowing cigar smoke into her desk at night so she would raise its lid on his scent in the morning. 

Charlotte disliked knowing this about herself. A lady should want a mature man who would protect her. She decided she’d been mistaken.  

“May we sit?” she asked, and when they did, she had nothing to say. No more did he. They both looked away, just enough to keep the other in sight.

“It’s comforting, is it not?” Mr. Nicholls asked, after a while. “To sit in peace.”

“I have a busy mind.”

“Well then, I’ll leave you to it,” he said, and got up to take off his coat and roll up his sleeves, looking even more like a farmer. He lay down on the edge of the beck and slid one bare arm slowly into it, his arm wavering in the sun-dappled water as if it were about to dissolve. Illusions made Charlotte uneasy, her eyesight bad enough without them. They made her feel vague, dreamy, disconnected from the world, and she pictured Mr. Nicholls slowly tipping into the beck, first his shoulder, then the rest of him sliding under. She saw him dissolving on the streambed, his eyes open and empty and glittering. It was the open eyes that panicked her. 

“What on earth are you doing?” 

“Be patient now,” he said. “I’m fishing.”

“Without a rod.”

“His rod and His staff, they comfort me. They have to, if a man can’t afford to kit himself out, and he has to fish by tickling.”

Charlotte controlled her panicky breath. The nerve of him, her father would say. Poor as a church mouse and wanting your hand. He’s after the money from your writing. 

No Father, in all conscience, he isn’t, she’d repeated many times. And there isn’t that much money.

More clouds. The wind was picking up. It swept over Mr. Nicholl as he lay prone, riffling his sleeves and flipping the hem of his waistcoat up and down. Charlotte had to go closer to see him properly, and sat down on a rock at the edge of the beck. His sun-dappled arm looked so much like the streambed that brown trout flitted over it unawares, swimming back and forth, back and forth like restless blunt-nosed underwater dogs.  

One eddied above his hand, and faster than Charlotte could see, he batted it far out onto the bank in a great cold splash that made her scream happily. A startled snipe rose beating into the air. Charlotte scrambled to her feet, brushing herself off. 

“You’ve got me all wet!”

“Put it out of its misery, then.”

Laughing. Squealing: “I cannot.”

Mr. Nicholls picked up a stone and walked over to the panicked tossing fish. He dispatched it quickly, threading a line from his picket through its gills and placing it back in a small pool behind a rock, off from the main current of the beck.

Afterwards, he lay down again, slipping his arm back in the water. It was already pink from the cold, with straight black hair laid out in thin lines. Charlotte was close enough to see this and like it, standing over him. 

“Won’t they be warned now and shy?”

“I’ve never found fish to be the most clever of God’s creatures. One more as a thank you to my friends Joe and Mrs. Grant, and perhaps a pair for your father’s supper, and yours.”

“My father,” Charlotte said. 

“I don’t blame him,” Mr. Nicholls said, with such depth that Charlotte couldn’t reach the bottom of it. 

“I’m all he has.”

“I’m aware of that.” 

They were silent again, before something seemed to occur. 

“Would you like to try? Or do ladies scorn it?” 

“My hands are too small.”

“They’re delicate,” Mr. Nicholls said, with improbable satisfaction. Charlotte was startled into holding out her paws and looking at them newly. The hands of a clever child.

A bossy stubborn child, not as talented as her younger siblings. 

A clever child, and wanted.