their father would die and they would be left to support
themselves. (Even more ironically, Mr. Bronte outlived all his
children.) The next year, Charlotte was sent to school again.
Roe Head, as the school was called, was a very pleasant place,
not at all like Cowan Bridge. While Charlotte was an excellent
student and made two lifelong friends during her two years at
Roe Head, she was too shy to feel completely at ease in
unfamiliar surroundings. After leaving school in 1832, at the
age of sixteen, she spent most of the next ten years at home.
The only exceptions were a two-and-a-half-year period when she
went back to Roe Head as a teacher while first Emily and then
Anne were pupils there, and two brief stints as a governess that
lasted only about ten months altogether.
Unlike her sister Emily, who never tired of hiking the
windswept moors around the Bronte home in Yorkshire, Charlotte
longed for travel and a more active life. Since her experiences
as a governess had been unhappy ones, she decided that perhaps
she and Emily should open a school of their own. Her plan
called for them to prepare by going to Belgium to brush up on
their knowledge of foreign languages. Charlotte was already
twenty-six when she and her sister entered the school of
Monsieur and Madame Heger in Brussels, and she was soon teaching
English lessons as well as studying. Emily went home after a
year, but Charlotte stayed on until 1843, when for some reason
the relationship between herself and Mme Heger became tense.
Judging from some letters she wrote, it seems that Charlotte had
fallen in love with M. Heger. Had he returned her affection?
Probably not. The theme of an impossible love affair--with a
married man, a teacher, in one case even a Belgian
teacher--keeps coming up in Charlotte Bronte's novels. Many
readers can't help concluding from this that M. Heger was the
great passion of Charlotte's life. But we can't be sure.
Less than two years after Charlotte's return home, her
brother Branwell was involved in a scandal. As the only boy,
Branwell had been the focus of the whole family's hopes for
worldly success. Charlotte, in particular, had always believed
that her brother was the true genius of the family. The devoted
sister was the last to see what was obvious to everyone else:
Branwell was a total failure. Not only had he never carried
through on his ambition to become a painter, he was an
alcoholic, a gambler, and eventually a drug addict. Anne, the
only sister who had managed to persevere with her career as a
governess, had arranged a job for Branwell as a tutor with the
same family she worked for. Branwell repaid the favor by
getting involved in a messy affair with the lady of the house,
Mrs. Robinson. In the end, both he and Anne were sent away in
disgrace.
