Christmas day draws ever nearer, and preparations are going full swing across the world, but the run up to the big day isn’t always a cheery one. It can be a challenging time, a time of grief, loss and confusion, as the residents of Haworth Parsonage found out as Christmas 1848 loomed.
On 19th December 1848 the great genius Emily Brontë died, aged just 30 years old. All round them in the following days celebrations were in full swing, but for the Brontë family in the parsonage things would never be the same again. Little could they have known that whilst they suffered a personal and insurmountable loss the world of literature had suffered a great loss too.
Charlotte Brontë turned, as she so often did, to her pen to help her deal with her grief, and two letters she sent in the aftermath of Emily’s death paint a very moving, very mournful, picture. The first letter was sent to W. S. Williams, of Charlotte’s publishing house, on 20th December 1848:
“My dear sir, when I wrote in such haste to Dr. Epps, disease was making rapid strides, nor has it lingered since, the galloping consumption has merited its name – neither physician nor medicine are needed more. Tuesday night and morning saw the last hours, the last agonies, proudly ensured till the end. Yesterday Emily Jane Brontë died in the arms of those who loved her.
Thus the strange dispensation is completed – it is incomprehensible as yet to mortal intelligence. The last three months – ever since my brother’s death seem to us like a long, terrible dream. We look for support to God – and thus far he mercifully enables us to maintain our self-control in the midst of affliction whose bitterness none could have calculated on.”
Three days later Charlotte Brontë wrote to Ellen Nussey, the friend to whom she had last written on the mourning of Emily’s passing just four days earlier:
“Dear Ellen, Emily suffers no more either from pain or weakness now. She never will suffer more in this world – she is gone after a hard, short conflict. She died on Tuesday, the very day I wrote to you. I thought it very possible then she might be with us still for weeks and a few hours afterwards she was in Eternity – Yes – there is no Emily in Time or on Earth now – yesterday, we put her poor, wasted mortal frame quietly under the Church pavement. We are very calm at present, why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over – the spectacle of the pain of Death is gone by – the funeral day is past – we feel she is at peace, no need now to tremble for the hard frost and keen wind – Emily does not feel them. She has died in a time of promise – we saw her torn from life in its prime – but it is God’s will, and the place where she is gone is better than that she has left.”
Emily’s final moments were spent upon the couch which can still be found in Haworth Parsonage’s dining room – that’s it at the head of this post. This day in 1848 marked the funeral of Emily Jane Brontë. The world would never see her like again, but we can still turn to her incredible novel and her wonderful poetry. Poetry like ‘The Old Stoic’, below, in which Emily set out her attitude to life, and death. Its final words now adorn the Brontë memorial at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner.
‘Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanish’d with the morn:
And, if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, ‘Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!’
Yea, as my swift days near their goal,
‘Tis all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.’
We remember Emily Brontë today and her faithful dog Keeper who, as Ellen Nussey said, lost all his former cheerfulness after Emily’s death and his role as chief mourner at her funeral. Let us turn now to cheerier matters, and I hope to see you on Wednesday for my traditional Christmas morning Brontë blog post.