Emily 1

One can only imagine how daunting the prospect must have been for Emily to know she would leave her regulated life and quiet home again, once she knew she would leave for Brussels. How different her new life would be, in a strange boarding school, in the midst of a large city and in a foreign country.
Though there are several reasons why Emily (instead of Anne) had been chosen to join Charlotte, her own, and probably only, reason why she did venture to leave her home was her thirst for knowledge, for learning. She would enter a whole new world of other literatures, and foreign languages. This journey would bring a great opportunity to broaden her mind and exercise her creative and mental powers.
And how did Emily experience all this? What did she make of Brussels, the Pensionnat? And what was going through her mind; how did she feel?
As with the rest of Emily’s personal life, so much is shrouded in mystery. She left no letters, and while in Brussels, she kept no diary. We can only form our conclusions by reading other people’s accounts. Charlotte’s letters to Ellen Nussey are the most important.

Emily’s life would be transformed from the ‘external’ world of the Parsonage in Yorkshire to an ‘internal’ world of the Pensionnat. This ‘Institution of Instruction’, the boarding school run by Constantin and Zoë Heger, lay in the sunken street of Rue d’Isabelle, towered over by high buildings around; the long, white front of the school concealing an inner world of a self-contained, controlled and efficiently run establishment. And inside this internal world was an inner sanctum, a beautifully kept garden. Though a peaceful retreat within a noisy and bustling city, with its secret Allée Défendue and secluded arching tree boughs, this garden was surrounded by walls and sides of other houses, giving it a sense of a ‘preserved fortress’.
Emily must have felt imprisoned in what she might have perceived as a place of detention.

It was however also a place of learning.
Emily’s knowledge of foreign languages, in particular French, was limited to what she was taught at Roe Head, what Charlotte had passed on to her and what she had learned herself.
She had a great deal of catching up to do in the first few months she stayed in the Pensionnat. During the free hours of the day, she devoted all her spare time to further reading and more studies. It would have been a serious test for her, not only having to speak and write French everyday, but also to be taught in it.
Emily and Charlotte were given French lessons by Constantin Heger, a gifted teacher who would notice his pupils’ talents and was able to cultivate and develop them.
In May 1842, a few months after their arrival, Charlotte writes to Ellen:

"…..Hitherto both Emily and I have had good health, and therefore we have been able to work well. There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken--M Heger, the husband of Madame. He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament; a little black ugly being, with a face that varies in expression……Emily and he don't draw well together at all. Emily works like a horse and she has had great difficulties to contend with--far greater than I have had.”

Between Emily and Heger arose a tension that remained charged during the entire time Emily was Heger’s pupil. He was an exacting master, inflexible, highly irritable and erratic.
They clashed at the very first lesson over Heger’s method of teaching. He proposed the sisters to read some of the great passages, masterpieces from French literature, discuss and analyse them and then to get these English pupils to write essays, expressing their own thoughts, based on the style of these models.
Emily opposed and rebelled; she could not agree with his system.
Charlotte recalls: “…she saw no good to be derived form it; and that by adopting it, they should lose all originality of thought and expression.”
Heger did not perhaps know Emily had been writing poems, tales and essays from a very young age and that she had long since passed the stage of finding her own distinct voice and style.

Despite Emily’s initial objections, she produced her ‘devoirs’, the required essays. During the summer of 1842, Emily worked diligently, producing some ten works.

No other poetry or prose by Emily survives from this period in her life, so these devoirs give an important insight into her creative writing. They show that Emily’s essays were superior both in power and imagination to Charlotte’s. Her devoirs astounded, impressed and even sometimes shocked Heger, as Emily’s essays conveyed a pessimistic, misanthropic and cynic view on mankind and a shrewd understanding of the cruelty in the world around her.
Heger’s view of Emily changed and he was impressed by her daring and originality of mind which revealed from her work. He recognized Emily’s to be the more exciting and challenging mind of the sisters and began to value her qualities.
Years later he said; “She should have been a man – a great navigator…her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have been given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman…[but]impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.” Emily, according to Heger, was also, “egoistical and exacting, and exercised a kind of unconscious tyranny over her [i.e. Charlotte].”