Sheila Kohler returns our blog with a special post where discusses what makes the fiction of the Brontë sisters so special to her, as both literary fiction and mystery fiction. Be sure to check our Sheila’s book on the Brontës, “Becoming Jane Eyre,” published by Penguin

I have often wondered what makes the Brontës, the three sisters from the remote Yorkshire village of Haworth, so beloved.  How and why have they remained both critically acclaimed and so popular over years.  Their books have been continuously published and made into plays and movies. There are over 30 adaptations of Wuthering Heights alone, by some counts, since the first silent film in 1920,  including the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier, and the 2026 adaptation. What is the secret of their success?

 I would suggest that they use the basic elements of the great mystery story: the imminent threat of violence, the conflict between secrecy and confession, and the reality of an evocative and detailed place, often the wild moors of Northern England or the “haunted houses” which echo the inner reality of the characters’ emotions. All of this with the Brontë’s expressive language has enabled them to remain immensely popular through the years.

Matthew Arnold famously wrote of Charlotte Brontë’s work being filled with “rebellion and rage.” Some of her first critics found her “coarse” and even “vulgar,” and it is true that all three of these apparently humble, reserved, and religious daughters of a clergyman, who initially adopted a pseudonym to hide their sex, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, create characters, both male and female capable of extreme violence. We have only to cite a few.

 In Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte we have Bertha Rochester, née Mason, of course, Mr. Rochester’s wild wife hidden in the attic of his ancestral home. We first sense her presence through her guardian, the mysterious Grace Poole whose laugh, the peal low and slow, thrills Jane initially. It is Grace Poole who drinks and thus enables Bertha , ready for revenge, to set her husband on fire in his bed and stab and bite her brother.

 Bertha is intemperate, exotic, an icon of violent and unrestrained sensuality and madness. She is capable of murder and arson. Bertha is the dangerous and unleashed part of Jane Eyre, our heroine, lurking in the upper floors at Thornfield Hall, ready to strike. Jane, and the reader with her, fear this initially unknown creature: “I was afraid of someone coming out of the inner room,” she tells her employer, Edward Rochester who has left her alone to guard Bertha’s stricken brother when Edward Rochester goes to get the doctor. Bertha kills herself by burning the ancestral Thornfield down in the end and almost killing Edward who remains blinded and maimed as a result.

In Wuthering Heights we have Heathcliff himself, the antihero, half demon, half Byronic hero, an orphan whom Mr. Earnshaw brings from Liverpool one night into the bosom of the family. He says, “See here wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life but you must take it as a gift of God though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.”

Heathcliff is capable of both great passion or obsession and great cruelty.  He marries Isabella just to spite her brother, Edgar Linton, whom Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s great love has married for his money and position in society. Heathcliff hangs his wife’s dog Fanny; he digs up his love, Catherine’s corpse “I got the sexton to remove the dirt from her coffin lid and I opened it.. I would have stayed there when I saw her face again..” ; he hates his own weak, sickly son, Linton, the child he fathers with Isabella. He hovers all through the book, dangerous and violent, from the first extraordinary scene when he thinks he sees his dead love, Catherine at the window, “Come in! come in!” he sobbed, to the last scene when Nelly Dean, the housekeeper finds him lying on his bed, wet with rain. “His eyes met mine so keen and fierce. I started; and he seemed to smile.” But he is dead. Heathcliff dies, unredeemed at the end though he gets his wish to be buried with Catherine.

 Vivid, terrifying, but all absorbing, he is unforgettable.  I have a memory of reading this book as an adolescent and one of our teachers asking us how many of us would have liked to marry Heathcliff. Appallingly, all the hands in the classroom shot up.

Even Anne Brontë in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall introduces a husband on a par with Heathcliff if he does not have his fascination or his passion. Arthur Huntingdon is an alcoholic and entirely self-centered. He leaves his wife Helen alone for months on end, and blatantly carries on an adulterous affair while drinking himself to death.  She can only escape him by running away with her son, changing her identity, taking on a false name to hide from him in Wildfell Hall. We follow her difficult endeavor with interest. Who is this my mysterious tenant? What is she hiding?   

At the center of all of these books there lies this basic conflict between secrecy, anonymity, what is not known, and confession. So many of these fascinating characters come with their secrets which are hinted at so skillfully from the start and only gradually, though sometimes spectacularly, revealed as we read on, turning the pages to discover the emotional truth which we find in these books.

In Jane Eyre we have of course Mr. Rochester whom Jane first meets as she walks back from town, and he falls from his horse.  He is obliged to accept Jane’s aid to remount, all of which of course presages the end of the book. The spectacular scene of revelation occurs at the “wedding” when we discover the existence of a wife, Bertha whom Mr. Rochester has hidden as best as he can at Thornfield Hall on the third floor. The scene in the church when the stranger speaks up as the parson pauses, and exposes Edward Rochester’s secret: “He paused as the custom is. When is the pause after that sentence ever broken by reply! Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years,” is wonderfully convincing and shocking.

Less spectacular but just as interesting is another character, Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s “Villette” who comes to us as our narrator but with no background, no childhood, no parents, no siblings, no class. Even her name is not given to us for the first chapter, and we only learn her age, fourteen when we first meet her, much later in the book. She remains a calm, detached, and often distant observer, giving us detailed and often disapproving descriptions of others, like the little girl Polly who comes to stay, who, unlike Lucy expresses her strong, moving emotions. It is Polly or Paulina who has lost her mother and had to leave her father and suffers terribly in her small heart in the big calm rooms with Lucy and her godmother in Bretton.

A little later on we meet the woman Lucy Snowe works for, Lucy now suddenly as an adult obliged to earn her keep. Miss Marchmont, the night before she dies, expresses all her sorrow at her beloved’s demise in their youth, while Lucy Snowe listens calmly to her tale of woe.  Lucy remains all through the book something of an enigma, arousing our curiosity: what trauma has taken away her ability to feel and express emotion? She makes us think of the war veteran, Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, who cannot feel. Only Lucy’s terrible loneliness as she walks the streets of the strange town of Villette, which even drives her, a firm protestant into a Catholic church to confess comes to us with great poignancy. We turn the pages, waiting for something more to be revealed about her past, as in a good mystery story.

Heathcliff himself in Wuthering Heights appears as a child with little information about his past. We never discover his parentage though it is hinted at he might have gypsy ancestry or even be the child of a slave ( Liverpool being a slave trading post.) . He remains a stranger, an unknown, someone Other and therefore intriguing to as is Bertha with her Creole heritage.

All these secrets are wonderfully echoed by the places where these characters reside which are so precisely and vividly portrayed: the moths fluttering over the heath and harebells, the wind breathing through the grass , the tap of the fir-bough against the window, and the rough stones of the moors around Wuthering Heights or the narrow, low and dim corridor “like a corridor in some Bluebird’s castle,” of the third floor at Thornfield Hall where Jane first hears Bertha’s strange mirthless laugh; the large peaceful rooms of the house in Bretton, the city with its quiet and clean streets, filled with sunlight where Lucy Snowe visits her godmother and first meets Graham who becomes the beloved Dr. John who rescues her in the dark, strange town of Villette.

We have here in all these books the violence of the mystery story, and all the seduction of its secrets and yet miraculously the ability to find emotional truth in these many pages, truth that both engages, sustains, and delights as does the great mystery story.