The agony of the post hour would become a repeated motif in Charlotte's mature fiction, inspired, it seems, by her experience of Heger's failure to reply to her letters. Yet Fannie Ratchford, the first editor of the Bronte juvenilia, noticed a similarity between the above passage and an episode in the Angrian saga Charlotte had written six years before in which the Duchess of Zamorna is neglected by her faithless absent husband. Repeatedly asking if the mail has arrived, the Duchess tells her attendant how she has been suffering "long, weary, sleepless nights" and that she could rest if only she had a letter. They are interrupted by a messenger returning from Zamorna empty-handed:
"Have you no letter for me, Mr Warner? Do you bring no message, no word of his welfare, no enquiry after mine?"
"My lady, I have not so much as a syllable for you."
Was the Heger correspondence inspired by Charlotte's literary imagination as much as it in turn inspired aspects of Villette? That novel would transform Charlotte's unrequited feelings for Heger into the mutual love of Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel, but perhaps she was already fictionalising her relationship with her "Master" in her letters of 1844 and 1845. Some aspects of Heger which she appears to have fed into Emanuel are at second glance revealed to have a longer heritage in her imagination, going back to a time before Brussels - his ever-present cigar, for example. Heger may, like Emanuel and Rochester, have smoked, but cigars had already been used by Charlotte to symbolise a hero's masculinity in her Angrian prose.
Charlotte composed her last surviving letter to Heger on November 18th. Concluding with a final-sounding "Farewell" in English, was she signing off from what was really "an invented correspondence, close to an imaginative act"? Writing into the void (his letters to her, none of which survive, were painfully infrequent), was she using the correspondence as a way of consciously exploring modes of passionate subjective expression which would eventually be fully developed in Jane Eyre and Villette?
The final extant letter dwells on her attempts to forget Heger, the imbalance between her feelings for him and his for her, her feverish misery at the daily disappointment of not receiving a letter from him. Yet we know that, by the time she wrote it, other hopes had begun to take hold in Charlotte's mind. That autumn, she had made her momentous discovery of Emily's verse and set about galvanising her sisters into preparing their Poems for publication. With biographer's hindsight we can see that she was no longer such a slave to the idea of Heger as she presents herself, that some sort of catharsis had begun to take place. This last letter is the most extreme expression of desperation and the most stylistic and emotionally consistent text of the correspondence. But its obsessional tone belies the fact that she had actually begun to move on.
In the end, the complex trail of thought and feeling aroused in Charlotte by her "Master" defy labelling. They slip through our fingers, not least because the correspondence is incomplete. From the available evidence we can try to resemble her state of mind, but, as Bernard in Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves puts it, biography can do no more than "tack together torn bits of stuff, stuff with raw edges". Gaps will always remain.
Uncannily, our fragmented vision is echoed by the fact that three of the four documents, now preserved in the British Library, are literally in fragments which have been carefully stuck and stitched together. After receiving Charlotte's letters, Heger ripped all but one of them up and threw the pieces away, but his wife retrieved them, painstakingly reassembled them, and put them in her jewel box for safe keeping. She must have let her husband know what she had done, for as we have seen he showed - or perhaps read - the letters to Elizabeth Gaskell in 1856.
Twenty-one years after Charlotte left Brussels, the Hegers' daughter Louise, whose truthful little face had as a child inspired a particular affection in Charlotte, went to a literary lecture about the author of Jane Eyre. The speaker told the audience that Charlotte Bronte had been cruelly treated by the callous Heger family in Brussels. Hurt, Louise mentioned the matter to her mother, who showed her the letters.
When Madame Heger died in 1890, Louise went through her mother's papers, retrieved Charlotte's letters and gave them to her father. Again, he tried throwing them away, but Louise rescued them from the wastepaper basket, as she was advised by a friend they were important literary documents. Some years after Constantin Heger's death in 1896, Louise finally discussed the matter with her brother Paul, a prominent scientist, who, on the advice of the critic M.H. Spielmann, decided to donate the letters to the British Museum.
The main reason prompting the release of the letters was Paul Heger's desire that the record be set straight, as suspicion about Charlotte's relationship with his father had been brewing for a long time. Though Charlotte's iconic image in the popular anthologies remained relatively static through the second half of the nineteenth century, other writers had begun to question whether Elizabeth Gaskell had told the full story.
The year 1877 had seen the first fulllength life of Charlotte since Gaskell's [Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte was published in 1857, two years after Charlotte's death]. Its author, Thomas Weniyss Reid, the editor of the Leeds Mercury, had been given access by Ellen Nussey to correspondence of Charlotte's which Mrs Gaskell had not seen. The main thrust of his biography was to show that "the life of the author of Jane Eyre was by no means so joyless as the world now believes it to have been". Though he still clung to the old moral rhetoric - Charlotte's was a life "made sacred and noble" by "self-repression" - he was not above speculating on her relationship with her teacher. Quoting a letter in which Charlotte told Ellen that she had returned to Brussels against her conscience, he hinted darkly that Charlotte had "tasted strange joys" at the Pensionnat Heger, evidence of which was to be found "not in her Life and letters, but in Villette . . . the revelation of the most vivid passages in her own heart's history".
This sort of speculation aroused bold attacks from writers who saw it as an insult to Charlotte's memory. Ever since Gaskell, biographers have tended to feel unusually possessive and protective of the Brontes, and Marion Harland, whose sentimental Charlotte Bronte at Home came out in 1899, was no exception. The rumours regarding Heger had reached such a pitch that it had become necessary, she thought, to quash "the romantic and unsavoury conclusion of a hopeless passion" which was being peddled on both sides of the Atlantic by "sensational penny-a-liners". Harland's conviction that Charlotte could not have been emotionally attached to Heger derived not from a careful examination of the evidence, but from her devotion to an idealised image of her heroine.
The "sensational penny-a-liners" to which Harland refers with such scorn represented a type of short, downmarket biography which had begun to displace the didactic anthology in popularity. These offered leisure reading designed to entertain as much as educate, and a typical example is the American paperback of 1883, An Hour with Charlotte Bronte, or, Flowers from a Yorkshire Moor by Laura Carter Holloway. This book is riddled with inaccuracies and purple passages, from errors such as the claim that Charlotte's mother was a Yorkshirewoman to the bold assertion that Charlotte never grew an inch after going to Cowan Bridge at the age of eight to the idea that she only ever "exhibited herself" to her London publishers on one occasion. Letting her imagination run riot over the evidence, Holloway not only repeats Gaskell's unsubstantiated claim that Patrick had viciously cut up his wife's best dress, but embellishes the story with reference to its "pretty figured" fabric.