What if Charlotte Bronte had met George Sand?

Charlotte in 1845, age 29, and the portrait by her brother, Branwell in 1834, age 18

When I read, I usually go down one track for quite awhile until I am sated, and am seduced into another direction, usually by the offhand comments or recommendations made by the current author I am reading.

Recent binges have included Truman Capote, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Brontë and George Sand.

Truman Capote recommended many writers, including Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Haskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë (not Charlotte Brontë herself, which was interesting), George Sand, Willa Cather, and Oscar Wilde's Letters. Just the letters!

Oscar Wilde recommended no-one but himself.

Charlotte Brontë recommended George Sand.

A true binge is when you read everything you can get your hands on about and by an author, including letters. Especially letters, if they are available.

My last year of binges began with Capote and may end with him, as I want to reread his letters again. 

Anyway.

While reading Elizabeth Gaskill's biography of Brontë, I discovered Charlotte's admiration for George Sand and her disinterest bordering on dislike for Jane Austin, who she thought led a sheltered life which she wrote about in precious ways.  Austin wrote the "Novel of Manners," realistic stories that concentrate on customs and conversation. She appreciated Austin's powers of observation, but little else. On the other hand, she practically worshipped William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, (1848) perhaps the ultimate Novel of Manners.

Charlotte Brontë was not a fan of Jane Austin's work

I found it most fascinating that she admired George Sand, a woman who seemed the opposite of Charlotte Brontë down to the last external detail. 

What did Charlotte see in George Sand, a cross-dressing libertine and fierce feminist? George Sand was more than that, of course -- a loyal friend, a lover of nature, a disciplined writer, and a passionate believer in the power of love. Her mother was a prostitute, her grandmother an aristocrat who raised her around privilege. 

George Sand inherited her grandmother's house, and lived there on and off until her death. She shared it at different times with her family, her lovers, (such as Chopin) and her literary circle.

George Sand's home at Nohant, France

Though she loved many, it is possible she herself was never truly loved, and this motivated many of her books. George Sand was born into exciting, post-revolutionary France and considered herself a bohemian, a breaker of rules and strictures around gender and roles. She was well-traveled, sophisticated, and surrounded by intellectuals, artists, writers, and musicians.

Charlotte was the daughter of a conservative Anglican clergyman. Her mother died when she was five. She watched her three sisters and only brother die unpleasant deaths at young ages. All but Anne Brontë were buried inside the family vault inside the church across the road. 

The outside graveyard, a mere stones-throw from the front door of the parsonage where the family lived, was overpacked with bodies (40,000 had been buried there over the years, I seem to remember). It was uphill from the town of Haworth, and thought to leak bodily fluids into the water supply from the constant burials, so that there were frequent outbreaks of typhoid and typhus in the town. 

Proximity of the Parsonage where the Brontë sisters and brother were raised to the old, overcrowded graveyard

The moor that surrounded them was bleak, cold, and windy. Life expectancy was short. Women led extremely confined lives and were disregarded entirely in any role outside the home. The three Brontë sisters figured out early that they would get farther in their literary aspirations by taking on men's names, Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. 

Jane Eyre first edition with Currer Bell indicated as the author.

George Sand did the same thing. Her real name was Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, but she referred to herself as a man throughout her life. 

Charlotte Brontë, who was known to be disinterested and clueless around children, died pregnant, a year after she was married to a curate, at age 38. She was the firstborn child and last to die, succeeded only by her father.

George Sand had a daughter and a son who grew to adulthood and furnished her with loving grandchildren. She had a full family life, a garden she loved, and freedom to go where she pleased, with whomever she pleased. She took this freedom. It wasn't necessarily offered.

So, what if Charlotte Brontë had gotten the chance to meet George Sand? What would they have thought of each other? Charlotte was not widely travelled. Except for a few years in Brussels where she studied French, the farthest reach of her exposure to cosmopolitan life and culture was London, where she met Thackeray.

I believe George Sand would have breathed some life, strength, and hope into Charlotte, and that George Sand would have felt the overpowering sadness of Charlotte's life. It would have affected both of their writing, and perhaps built a bridge between two cultures of women that were very different -- ruthlessly repressed England and more liberal, sexual, and perhaps more fatuous France. Though they were so different in circumstance and upbringing, I believe they were essentially soul mates. 

Perhaps there's a book in there, somewhere.

Notes on a Tuesday Afternoon

"...things have always hit me very hard. I suppose that is why i never run out of material to write about. The inside of me is so full of dents and scars, where pleasant and unpleasant things have hit me in the past.... Faces, situations, things people said long ago simply come up from my mind as if they were written down. They would not be there if they hadn't hit me so hard."--Willa Cather

Its been raining in Oaxaca, a good season for napping and reading. This afternoon I was curled up with "Death Comes for the Archbishop" and that led to some internet research on Willa Cather's life, and the recently published (2013) "Selected Letters of Willa Cather."

The kindle edition is (choke!) $14.99, while it does come in a bit over 700 pages. But digital is digital, right? How much do a few extra digits cost? 

What I usually do in these situations is run over to Abe Books where yes, I see a copy for $4.31. I just hope the print isn't too small for my weak glasses.

I always think that books of letters, where they exist, are the best way to get to know a writer. It's rather sad to consider that as soon as fifty years from now, it may be nigh on impossible for young writers to find actual books of letters from admired authors, people who are writing now. Maybe they'll find a book of collected tweets? Facebook posts?

Willa did have a problem with spelling that was finally corrected when she started studying at the University of Nebraska. I found this quote from an early letter, age 14...

"I am deep in "Caesar"--poor vetren, who are we that we should censure Brutus when in youth we do the dread dead dayly,--murder Caesar. Also reading Gorge Sand."

Charming!

I am told that these letters reveal and emotional and enthusiastic spirit whose curiosity and kindness lit the lives of those around her.

As far as her writing, there were at least two schools of thought; those who said she was writing behind her times (she read, admired, and emulated writers from bygone eras) and those who thought she was a moving and brilliant writer who created her own niche, in her own way.

Some critics of her own time urged her to be more like au courant James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. They had no interest in a woman of the plains, who was writing about a life closer to nature and its challenges. 

Some thought she was a lesbian.

Others insisted she was not.

I'm not convinced it matters, except when she wrote a few gender-bending pieces about energetic little girls who cut their hair short and were determined to live life their way. 

We used to call that being a tomboy. 

But there are the times to consider, and in those days, in America, I am not sure women knew what a lesbian was, even if they might have been one, had they known! Nebraska wasn't Paris, let's put it that way.

Nothing I have read ABOUT Willa Cather's writing so far, matches my EXPERIENCE of reading her. And that piques my interest.

On another subject, last night I finished binge-watching "The Keepers," the Netflix series about the sadistic, child-raping priest who is suspected of murdering a nun in 1969. He has been protected all these years, not only by the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Maryland, but the city government and police. Somebody should do something about this horrifying collusion. Not being a Catholic, that somebody is not me, except as far as I can spread awareness.

"The Keepers" series is really about a group of middle-aged women who slowly found each other when their repressed memories overtook their lifelong determination to forget, and forced them to reach out. For some, the past flooded back when they learned about the murder of one of their teachers, a young nun who was determined to stop the priest from devouring the girls of the school. It's about the women's fundamental decency, patience, coming of age and consciousness, and yes, finally, anger. I can't recommend it highly enough. What an amazing collection of women! 

The series is one of those "things" that Willa Cather talked about, things that hit very hard, that are life changing.

It's one of the reasons we never run out of things to write about.

If cows could talk

Walking on a moonlight night in Aquitaine with a British friend. We came upon a few cows near a fence, but across one of the drainage ditches that run along the roads in Southern France. I was a Buddhist nun then, bald and in gray robes. My friend from Nottingham asked me if I knew how to talk to cows, and when I shook my head, she taught me how. You breath in deeply, and then breath out as noisily as you can, using both your throat and your nasal passages. Not a pretty sound, but an earthy one. You breath in and out, slowly. The cows were riveted. In no time they started responding, breath for breath.

Writing is like that. You put something out there, and sometimes you feel that there is a rising in the universe to meet it. It's like plucking exactly the right string, or making a hole in one when you've never even picked up the clubs before. 

These are the moments of effortless "genius" that every writer has, that can't be taught. They are gifts, ephemeral and rare, though if you have diligently practiced your craft they will be more likely to arise.

But 99% of the time it doesn't happen that way, does it? We have to apply good old fashioned elbow grease to get those sentences flowing just so, and the characters drawn so vividly we are not conscious of those perfect sentences that describe them. 

Perfectionists like Truman Capote, agonize over every word, every sentence, as they go along. He was observed on more than one occasion, pen in hand, with an expression on his face as if he was literally giving birth!  Before he moved on to the next sentence, he had to be completely satisfied with the last one he had written. And that perfectionism shows in his work. Two other writers that reach his level of hitting exactly the right note every time are Eudora Welty (if you don't know her work, start with House of Mirth), and Willa Cather (especially Death Comes to the Archbishop). 

The process is so wonderfully varied between writers. Norman Mailer and Theodore Dreiser slapped down cringeworthy sentences all day everyday and still rose to the top of their generation's hit list.

Hemingway is held up as a paradigm of good writing, though he bores me silly.

D.H. Lawrence rewrote "Lady Chatterley" three times, each time without referring to the last draft. All three versions were eventually published.

Many writers slapdash the first draft and figure they'll tweak it to perfection when it's all down on the page. Nothing wrong with that. But sometimes it's good to have a solid foundation under you before you rush forward, a deeper feeling for your characters, a more vivid sense of place.

So sometimes you can tune in and breathe with the cows, talk with the dolphins, communicate directly with the muse of the unseen universe. But most of the time we have to wing it. We have to do what we can with the limited, improvable skills we have, while working to make them better.

So, the next time you see a cow hanging out next to a fence, stop the car and walk on over. See what she has to say.