My dear friend A pointed me at a splendid, vehement article published recently in The Guardian. The piece, by Tanya Gold, takes issue with the now-standard image of author Charlotte Brontë: that of “a dull, Gothic drudge”. Gold attributes this take on Brontë to biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, calling her

a literary criminal, who, in 1857, perpetrated a heinous act of grave-robbing. Gaskell took Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time, and, like an angel murdering a succubus, trod on her. In a “biography” called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the author’s death, Gaskell stripped Charlotte of her genius and transformed her into a sexless, death-stalked saint.

The real Charlotte, Gold claims, was a “filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and [a] friend”.

I’ve never read Brontë (shame, I hear you cry!) but now I begin to see just what I missed. To think that I was wasting my adolescence on Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria stories when I could have been absorbed in Jane Eyre, “a dark Cinderella tale” in which Brontë apparently “dared, baldly, to state her lust”.

Instead I spent my time with Howard’s Conan, a muscle-bound, brooding swordsman who sent heads rolling on all sides, and slaked his lust (yes: apparently Conan and Brontë — lustful creatures both of them — would have got on like two houses on fire) … slaked his lust on a rich supply of kohl-eyed temple maidens who usually looked at him vampishing from behind the altars of pagan temples and then — more often than not — would leap across that same altar (your standard issue altar: rough stone, stained with the blood of countless sacrifices, lit fitfully by a guttering candle or two) … propelled by some ungovernable lust the temple maidens would leap across the altar in the general Conanian direction (scattering the candles, the sacrifical obsidian blades) and throw themselves upon him. The reader would then turn the page expecting vivid scenes of mutual Cimmerian slaking. Paragraphs of slaking, involving “thews” and similar nouns…

But thrilling scenes like these would mark the ends of chapters in the Conan novels, for they were written in the 1930’s when literary morals were somewhat more refined than they are today. A veil would be dropped between the reader’s eyes — my eyes in this re-enactment — and the lust itself. Thank god, for who knows to what scandalous depths of depravity I might have sunk if Howard had been less discreet. Why I might have been led directly to Jane Eyre.