Mightier than the sword

True-crime writer James Tully puts Charlotte Brontë -- survivor of three prematurely passed sisters -- behind the trigger in his new book.

By Carlene Bauer

Sep 8, 1999 | When she wasn't writing novels, Charlotte Brontk busied herself stirring up some bosom-heaving drama of her own. Possessed by jealousy and love, the eminent Victorian kept quiet when her curate husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, poisoned her siblings Branwell and Emily. Charlotte herself also managed to poison her youngest sister, Anne, and eventually died at the hands of her husband, who wanted to silence one last possible snitch. If that doesn't sound like anything you ever read in your "Norton Anthology of British Literature," there's a reason: This is the Brontk legend according to British true-crime writer James Tully, whose mystery novel "The Crimes of Charlotte Brontk" owes more to the Fleet Street school of journalism than the Penguin Classics.

Tully, whose previous book was the nonfiction "Prisoner 1167: The Madman Who Was Jack the Ripper," originally submitted his tale to his British publishers as true crime; Robinson Publishing suggested that his somewhat suspect theories might go over better in novel form. So his conjecture appears in the form of a deposition given by Martha Brown, a housemaid who did in fact serve the Brontks. (Her protracted dalliance with Nicholls, however, is invented.) Martha's story is framed by that of Charles Coutts, a lawyer who discovered the document and frequently interrupts Brown to corroborate her testimony.

The resulting schizophrenic narrative veers between Gothic soap opera and actual scholarship. When it's soapy, you're treated to prose as unwittingly comic in its relentless lack of humor as an academic article on, say, the concept of the diseased landscape in "Jane Eyre." A sample, from Martha's confession to a rendezvous with Nicholls:

"I do not wish to set down all that happened next -- let it be enough to say that we ended up on the stones of the kitchen floor and when, but a few moments later it seemed, we got to our feet again we both knew that things would never be the same again."

Imagine "Unsolved Mysteries" shooting on remote from the moors and you might get an idea as to the grace of Tully's storytelling; scenes often beg for the subtitle "dramatic reenactment."

And yet Tully doesn't miss every mark. When he nearly throws off all pretense at fiction -- as he does in the epilogue -- he manages to draw convincing parallels between the symptoms of the three women poisoned by Jack the Ripper (purportedly his area of expertise) and those exhibited by the dying Brontks. Most historians accept the theories that Branwell died from drink and drugs, Emily and Anne from tuberculosis and Charlotte, possibly pregnant at the time, from a digestive-tract ailment.

In the end, however, Tully fails to mount a convincing argument. As evidence, he notes the perhaps mysterious lack of detailed medical records, three deaths in nine months and all those bestsellers from three little girls who didn't have much formal instruction. But he can't do better than reinterpret these facts to suit his own theories. What really requires addressing here is the specter of misogyny that hovers over Tully's book -- not his chimerical allegations of foul play.

Tully believes that Charlotte Brontk's additional crimes included unseemly talent and drive. His Charlotte is a greedy, cheap, delusional, jealous spinster who only seems to soften up, of course, when she is satisfying her sexual appetite. Coutts -- Tully's alter ego -- sums up her life:

"Basically she was a domineering and ambitious child who became a domineering and ambitious woman ... The only ways in which she could offset the feelings of shame and inferiority were to tell herself that she was intellectually superior ... and to attempt to dominate ... and become the centre of attention."

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