The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (23 page)

By 1845 the first phase of Browning's life was near its end. In that year he met Elizabeth Barrett. In her
Poems
(1844) Barrett had included lines praising Browning, who wrote to thank her (January 1845). In May they met and soon discovered their love for each other. Barrett had, however, been for many years an invalid, confined to her room and thought incurable. Her father, moreover, was a dominant and selfish man, jealously fond of his daughter, who in turn had come to depend on his love. When her doctors ordered her to Italy for her health and her father refused to allow her to go, the lovers, who had been corresponding and meeting regularly, were forced to act. They were married secretly in September 1846; a week later they left for Pisa.

Throughout their married life, although they spent holidays in France and England, their home was in Italy, mainly at Florence, where they had a flat in Casa Guidi. Their income was small, although after the birth of their son, Robert, in 1849 Mrs. Browning's cousin John Kenyon made them an allowance of £100 a year, and on his death in 1856 he left them £11,000.

Browning produced comparatively little poetry during his married life.
Men and Women
(1855) was a collection of 51 poems—dramatic lyrics such as
Memorabilia
,
Love Among the Ruins
, and
A Toccata of Galuppi's
; the great monologues such as
Fra Lippo Lippi
,
How It Strikes a Contemporary
, and
Bishop Blougram's Apology
; and a very few poems in which implicitly (
By the Fireside
) or explicitly (
One Word More
) he broke his rule and spoke of himself and of his love for his wife.
Men and Women
, however, had no great sale, and many of the reviews were unfavourable and unhelpful. Disappointed for the first time by the reception of his work, Browning in the following years wrote little, sketching and modeling in clay by day and enjoying the society of
his friends at night. At last Mrs. Browning's health, which had been remarkably restored by her life in Italy, began to fail. On June 29, 1861, she died in her husband's arms. In the autumn he returned slowly to London with his young son.

His first task on his return was to prepare his wife's
Last Poems
for the press. At first he avoided company, but gradually he accepted invitations more freely and began to move in society. Another collected edition of his poems was called for in 1863, but
Pauline
was not included. When his next book of poems,
Dramatis Personae
(1864)—including
Abt Vogler
,
Rabbi Ben Ezra
,
Caliban upon Setebos
, and
Mr. Sludge, “The Medium”
—reached two editions, it was clear that Browning had at last won a measure of popular recognition.

In 1868–69 he published his greatest work,
The Ring and the Book
, based on the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in 1698. Grand alike in plan and execution, it was at once received with enthusiasm, and Browning was established as one of the most important literary figures of the day. For the rest of his life he was much in demand in London society. He spent his summers with friends in France, Scotland, or Switzerland or, after 1878, in Italy.

The most important works of his last years, when he wrote with great fluency, were long narrative or dramatic poems, often dealing with contemporary themes. While staying in Venice in 1889, Browning caught a cold, became seriously ill, and died on December 12. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

(b. April 21, 1816, Thornton, Yorkshire, Eng.—d. March 31, 1855, Haworth, Yorkshire)

C
harlotte Brontë was an English novelist best known for
Jane Eyre
(1847), a strong narrative of a woman in
conflict with her natural desires and social condition. The novel gave new truthfulness to Victorian fiction.

Her father was Patrick Brontë (1777–1861), an Anglican clergyman. Irish-born, he had changed his name from the more commonplace Brunty. After serving in several parishes, he moved with his wife, Maria Branwell Brontë, and their six small children to Haworth amid the Yorkshire moors in 1820, having been awarded a rectorship there. Soon after, Mrs. Brontë and the two eldest children (Maria and Elizabeth) died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three girls—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—and a boy, Patrick Branwell. Their upbringing was aided by an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who left her native Cornwall and took up residence with the family at Haworth.

In 1824 Charlotte and Emily, together with their elder sisters before their deaths, attended Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. The fees were low, the food unattractive, and the discipline harsh. Charlotte condemned the school (perhaps exaggeratedly) long years afterward in
Jane Eyre
, under the thin disguise of Lowood. Charlotte and Emily returned home in June 1825, and for more than five years the Brontë children learned and played there, writing and telling romantic tales for one another and inventing imaginative games played out at home or on the desolate moors.

In 1831 Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, near Huddersfield, where she stayed a year and made some lasting friendships. Her correspondence with one of her friends, Ellen Nussey, continued until her death, and has provided much of the current knowledge of her life. In 1832 she came home to teach her sisters but in 1835 returned to Roe Head as a teacher. The work, with its inevitable restrictions, was uncongenial to Charlotte. She
fell into ill health and melancholia and in the summer of 1838 terminated her engagement.

In 1839 Charlotte declined a proposal from the Rev. Henry Nussey, her friend's brother, and some months later one from another young clergyman. At the same time Charlotte's ambition to make the practical best of her talents and the need to pay Branwell's debts urged her to spend some months as governess with the Whites at Upperwood House, Rawdon. Branwell's talents for writing and painting, his good classical scholarship, and his social charm had engendered high hopes for him; but he was fundamentally unstable, weak willed, and intemperate. He went from job to job and took refuge in alcohol and opium.

Meanwhile his sisters had planned to open a school together, which their aunt had agreed to finance. The plan would eventually fail, but in February 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels as pupils to improve their qualifications in French and acquire some German. The talent displayed by both brought them to the notice of Constantin Héger, a fine teacher and a man of unusual perception. After a brief trip home, Charlotte returned to Brussels as a pupil-teacher. She stayed there during 1843 but was lonely and depressed. Her friends had left Brussels, and Madame Héger appears to have become jealous of her. The nature of Charlotte's attachment to Héger and the degree to which she understood herself have been much discussed. She offered him an innocent but ardent devotion, but he tried to repress her emotions.

By 1846 Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were trying to place the three novels they had written. Charlotte failed to place
The Professor: A Tale
but had, however, nearly finished
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
, begun in August 1846 in Manchester, where she was staying with her father,
who had gone there for an eye operation. When Smith, Elder and Company, declining
The Professor
, declared themselves willing to consider a three-volume novel with more action and excitement in it, she completed and submitted it at once.
Jane Eyre
was accepted, published less than eight weeks later (on Oct. 16, 1847), and had an immediate success, far greater than that of the books that her sisters published the same year. Central to its success is the fiery conviction with which it presented a thinking, feeling woman, craving for love but able to renounce it at the call of impassioned self-respect and moral conviction.

The months that followed were tragic ones. Branwell died in September 1848, Emily in December, and Anne in May 1849. Charlotte completed
Shirley: A Tale
in the empty parsonage, and it appeared in October. In the following years Charlotte went three times to London as the guest of her publisher; there she met the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray and sat for her portrait by George Richmond. She stayed in 1851 with the writer Harriet Martineau and also visited her future biographer, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell, in Manchester and entertained her at Haworth.
Villette
came out in January 1853. Meanwhile, in 1851, she had declined a third offer of marriage, this time from James Taylor, a member of Smith, Elder and Company. Her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls (1817–1906), an Irishman, was her fourth suitor. It took some months to win her father's consent, but they were married on June 29, 1854. She began another book,
Emma
, of which some pages remain. Her pregnancy, however, was accompanied by exhausting sickness, and she died in 1855. Her first novel,
The Professor
, which is based on her experiences in Brussels, was published posthumously in 1857.

(b. July 12, 1817, Concord, Mass., U.S.—d. May 6, 1862, Concord)

T
he American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher Henry David Thoreau is renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork,
Walden
(1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849).

Thoreau entered Harvard University in 1833. Graduating in the middle ranks of the class of 1837, he searched for a teaching job and secured one at his old grammar school in Concord. But he was no disciplinarian, and he resigned after two shaky weeks. A canoe trip that he and his brother John took along the Concord and Merrimack rivers in 1839 confirmed in him the opinion that he ought to be not a schoolmaster but a poet of nature.

Sheer chance made his entrance to writing easier, for he came under the benign influence of the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had settled in Concord during Thoreau's sophomore year at Harvard. By the autumn of 1837, they were becoming friends. Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true disciple—that is, one with so much Emersonian self-reliance that he would still be his own man. Thoreau saw in Emerson a guide, a father, and a friend. With his magnetism Emerson attracted others to Concord. Out of their heady speculations and affirmatives came New England Transcendentalism.

In Emerson's company Thoreau's hope of becoming a poet looked not only proper but feasible. He wrote some poems—a good many, in fact—for several years. Captained by Emerson, the Transcendentalists started a magazine,
The Dial
; the inaugural issue, dated July 1840, carried
Thoreau's poem
Sympathy
and his essay on the Roman poet Aulus Persius Flaccus.

The Dial
published more of Thoreau's poems and then, in July 1842, the first of his outdoor essays, “Natural History of Massachusetts.” Then followed more lyrics, such as
To the Maiden in the East
, and another nature essay, “A Winter Walk.”
The Dial
ceased publication with the April 1844 issue, having published a richer variety of Thoreau's writing than any other magazine ever would.

By early 1845 Thoreau felt more restless than ever, until he decided to take up an idea of a Harvard classmate who had once built a waterside hut in which one could loaf or read. In the spring Thoreau picked a spot by Walden Pond, a small lake south of Concord on land Emerson owned. Once settled, after building his home, he restricted his diet for the most part to the fruit and vegetables he found growing wild and the beans he planted. When not occupied with fishing, swimming, or rowing, he spent long hours observing and recording the local flora and fauna, reading, and writing.

Out of such activity and thought came
Walden
, a series of 18 essays describing Thoreau's experiment in basic living. Several of the essays provide his original perspective on the meaning of work and leisure and describe his experiment in living as simply and self-sufficiently as possible, while in others Thoreau describes the various realities of life at Walden Pond: his intimacy with the small animals he came in contact with; the sounds, smells, and look of woods and water at various seasons; the music of wind in telegraph wires. The physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond is what gives the book authority, while Thoreau's command of a clear, straightforward but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic.

Midway in his Walden sojourn Thoreau had spent a night in jail. On an evening in July 1846 he encountered
Sam Staples, the constable and tax gatherer. Staples asked him amiably to pay his poll tax, which Thoreau had omitted paying for several years. He declined, and Staples locked him up. The next morning a still-unidentified lady, perhaps his aunt, Maria, paid the tax. Thoreau reluctantly emerged, did an errand, and then went huckleberrying. A single night, he decided, was enough to make his point that he could not support a government that endorsed slavery and waged an imperialist war against Mexico. His defense of the private, individual conscience against the expediency of the majority found expression in his most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which was first published in May 1849 under the title “Resistance to Civil Government.”

When Thoreau left Walden in 1847, he passed the peak of his career. Slowly his Transcendentalism drained away as he became a surveyor in order to support himself. But as Thoreau became less of a Transcendentalist he became more of an activist—above all, a dedicated abolitionist. As much as anyone in Concord, he helped to speed fleeing slaves north on the Underground Railroad. He lectured and wrote against slavery. In the abolitionist John Brown he found a father figure beside whom Emerson paled. By now Thoreau was in poor health, and when Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry failed and he was hanged in 1859, Thoreau suffered a psychic shock that probably hastened his own death, apparently of tuberculosis.