Nine years after the death of Charlotte Brontë in 1855, her widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls, married his cousin and fellow Protestant, Mary Anna Bell, in whose family home in Banagher, Co Offaly, he had grown up (though born in Co Antrim). Their marriage lasted 42 years until Nicholls’s death in Banagher in 1906, in a house full of Brontë memorabilia inherited from Charlotte and her Irish father, Patrick Brontë, formerly Brunty, whom Nicholls had served as assistant curate in Haworth, Yorkshire.
Martina Devlin’s novel adopts the ambivalent perspective of the widowed Mary in 1913, as she looks back over decades of accommodating her emotional needs to Arthur’s continued devotion to Charlotte’s memory. Now legal owner of the remaining collection of Brontëana – which Arthur has already begun disposing of, as household finances become straitened in consequence of the Land Acts – Mary is increasingly tempted to sell the rest, while media interest in Charlotte is intensifying following the (real-life) publication in The Times of her impassioned letters to her married tutor Constantin Heger.
Mary’s memories (and, perhaps, imaginings) range from her brief acquaintance with Charlotte during her honeymoon in post-Famine Ireland in 1854, through the years of her own marriage to Arthur. Her narrative is interspersed with fictional documents including letters, interview transcripts and a mysterious manuscript story, while episodes recalling Brontë's life and novels blend with a fictional subplot concerning an illegitimate birth.
Like Devlin’s previous novel, Edith (2022), Charlotte articulates an Anglo-Irish psychology of uneasy inheritances and divided loyalties – though crowded incidents and a sprawling timeline prevent it from achieving the atmospheric intensity, or the narrative momentum, that Edith’s tightly focalised, linear structure enabled.
Exploration of Brontë's own half-Irish, half-English identity is meanwhile frustratingly confined to the realms of counterhistorical fantasy, as Charlotte flees her Dublin honeymoon to visit her Brunty relations in Co Down, in defiance of Patrick’s shame over their folksy ways and Catholic ancestry. Her uncle William Brunty’s activities in 1798 are hinted at only in an ironic comment from Arthur (“Who knows what else there is to be dug up? Irish rebels, I shouldn’t wonder”), and in two incidents where the Nichollses are menaced by the Bruntys’ rooster, named Henry Joy McCracken. Charlotte, at least, is forgiving: “He was defending his territory.”
