Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  She wrote back promptly, eager to express her gratitude and respond to the suggestion that a future work of suitable length—three volumes—“would meet with careful attention.” She had just such a work almost ready, which she told them could be sent in about a month (she actually managed to finish Jane Eyre in rather less time than that). But, even at this point, she couldn’t help putting in another word—two more words—for the rejected Brussels novel. Why not publish The Professor anyway, she suggested, to “accustom the public to the author’s name”? She still felt strongly that having The Professor in print would make subsequent success more probable. She even went as far as to suggest that she thought she might offer the books as a pair, a dangerous gamble to take at this juncture and one that Smith, Elder politely declined. Charlotte had no choice but to put aside her first novel and send off the second alone, walking to Keighley on 24 August to dispatch it by rail.

  When Williams read Jane Eyre, he pressed it on Smith with an urgency that at first amused his employer, but that Smith understood when he settled down with the manuscript after breakfast on Sunday morning. He had been engaged to visit a friend at noon, but got so caught up in the story of the “plain, insignificant governess” that when it was time to leave, he scribbled a note of apology to the friend, sent it off by his groom, and carried on reading. “Presently the servant came to tell me that luncheon was ready; I asked him to bring me a sandwich and a glass of wine, and still went on with ‘Jane Eyre.’ Dinner came; for me the meal was a very hasty one, and before I went to bed that night I had finished reading the manuscript.”

  The next day Smith wrote accepting the book for publication, although not without some “advice”—now lost—to the author. From Currer Bell’s response on 12 September it must have involved taming down the early chapters about Jane’s treatment at the hands of her aunt and at Lowood School, and the death of Helen Burns. Currer Bell told Smith that he had already considerably softened the truth on which these episodes were based and could do no more without damaging the book’s integrity: though they were strongly expressed, the harsher parts of Jane Eyre “may suit the public taste better than you anticipate.”*5 Here, the debut novelist proved right. However, she—he—accepted the firm’s other suggestion that the title could be changed, and “Jane Eyre: a novel in three vols. By Currer Bell” became “Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell.” Someone at Smith, Elder (and the manuscript had by this time been read by three of the staff, Williams, Smith and their young Scottish colleague James Taylor) had recognised the potential of making readers wonder—could this story actually be true? The tweak to the title created a fiction that made the heroine Jane less fictional, made her into an autobiographer, “edited”—at some distance in time (for, as not many people notice, the action of the book starts in the 1810s)—by Currer Bell.

  Smith was offering £100 for the copyright—an infinitely better deal than Emily and Anne’s with Newby, which had amounted to little more than vanity publishing again. It was also considerably more than most women could ever dream of earning in a year, and one might have expected Charlotte to sound pleased when she wrote back to Smith, but she was in the character of Currer Bell, so made the dry observation that “one hundred pounds is a small sum for a year’s intellectual labour.” Part of the pleasure of being able “to walk invisible” behind her male pseudonym was this new-found licence to answer as a man would—even if Smith didn’t recognise it.

  Charlotte also agreed to give Smith first refusal on her next two novels at the same rate, an astute move on the part of the publisher, whose hopes for Jane Eyre were high. Privately, though Currer Bell sniffed slightly at £100, Charlotte Brontë’s relief was considerable, knowing that she had sold one book and had an interested market for others. In fact, she was so willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the door open (except revise Jane Eyre) that she asked Smith for specific advice “as to choice of subject or style of treatment in my next effort—and if you can point out any works peculiarly remarkable for the qualities in which I am deficient, I would study them carefully and endeavour to remedy my errors.” Clearly, she did not want to lose Smith’s patronage by starting off on another unsaleable work.

  The progress of Jane Eyre through the press showed what safe hands Charlotte had fallen into at Smith, Elder by comparison with her sisters, whose dealings with Thomas Newby completely stalled in the autumn of 1847. Proofs came and went for Currer with no news at all for Ellis and Acton, and by the end of October Jane Eyre had sailed into print while Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey still languished on Newby’s desk.

  Six sets of Jane Eyre arrived at the Parsonage on publication day, 19 October 1847, presumably much to the interest of the postmaster, Mr. Hartley. Reviews began flooding in immediately, from the daily papers, religious journals, provincial gazettes, trade magazines, as well as from the expected literary organs such as the Athenaeum, Critic and Literary Gazette. Charlotte had been anxious about the critical reception of “a mere domestic novel,” hoping it would at least sell enough copies to justify her publisher’s investment—in the event, it triumphed on both fronts. The response was powerful and immediate. Reviewers praised the unusual force of the writing: “One of the freshest and most genuine books which we have read for a long time,” “far beyond the average,” “very clever and striking,” with images “like the Cartoons of Raphael…true, bold, well-defined.” “This is not merely a work of great promise,” the Atlas said, “it is one of absolute performance”; while the influential critic George Henry Lewes seemed spellbound by the book’s “psychological intuition”: “It reads like a page out of one’s own life.” It sold in thousands and was reprinted within ten weeks; eventually, even Queen Victoria was arrested by “that intensely interesting novel.” Only four days after publication, William Makepeace Thackeray, whose masterpiece Vanity Fair was unfolding before the public in serial form at exactly the same time, wrote to thank Williams for his complimentary copy of Jane Eyre. He had “lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it”; in fact it had engrossed him so much that his own printers were kept waiting for the next instalment of Becky Sharp’s adventures, and when the servant came in with the coals, he found Mr. Thackeray weeping over Currer Bell’s love scenes.

  Who was Currer Bell? A man, obviously. This forthright tale of attempted bigamy and an unmarried woman’s passion could have been written only by a man, thought Albany Fonblanque, the reviewer in John Forster’s influential Examiner, who praised the book’s thought and morals as “true, sound, and original” and believed that “Whatever faults may be urged against the book, no one can assert that it is weak or vapid. It is anything but a fashionable novel…as an analysis of a single mind…it may claim comparison with any work of the same species.”

  Charlotte could hardly keep up with responding to the cuttings that Williams was sending on by every post, and even received a letter from George Henry Lewes while he was writing his review for Fraser’s Magazine, wanting to engage in a detailed analysis of the book. “There are moments when I can hardly credit that anything I have done should be found worthy to give even transitory pleasure to such men as Mr. Thackeray, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Fonblanque, Leigh Hunt and Mr. Lewes,” Currer Bell told his publisher; “that my humble efforts should have had such a result is a noble reward.” It must have been difficult for Emily and Anne to be wholly delighted for their sister, with their own books apparently forgotten, though when Newby saw the success of Currer Bell he suddenly moved back into action with the production of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, hoping to cash in on the excitement.

  In the middle of this storm of gratification, Charlotte wrote to Ellen as if literally nothing of note was happening in Haworth—“heaven knows I have precious little to say”—but at home, the time had come to inform her father of the reason for the sudden flood of post from London, and his daughters’ animation. Patrick Brontë told Mrs. Gaskell later that he suspected all along that the girls were somehow
trying to get published, “but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing—and not writing letters.” Sometime in November or early December 1847, between the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte sought out her father in his study after his usual solitary dinner, with a copy of her novel to show him and two or three reviews, including one that was critical—a characteristic piece of scrupulousness. Mrs. Gaskell wrote down, in the week she heard it, Charlotte’s own report of the scene:

  “Papa I’ve been writing a book.” “Have you my dear?” and he went on reading. “But Papa I want you to look at it.” “I can’t be troubled to read MS.” “But it is printed.” “I hope you have not been involving yourself in any such silly expense.” “I think I shall gain some money by it. May I read you some reviews.” So she read them; and then she asked him if he would read the book. He said she might leave it, and he would see.

  When he came in to tea some hours later it was with the announcement, “Children, Charlotte has been writing a book—and I think it is a better one than I expected.” The scene made a pleasantly comical end to the secrecy that the girls had found obnoxious at home, however essential it seemed elsewhere, and Reverend Brontë’s pride in his daughter’s success became one of Charlotte’s deepest pleasures in the following years. The old man began to take an intense interest in the review coverage (more than in the work, perhaps) and kept a cuttings book of everything that came his way, meticulously arranged and dated. Quite when he heard about Emily’s and Anne’s novels is unclear—presumably soon after their books were published in December 1847—but he never esteemed their achievement as high as Charlotte’s, and said that their works “though clever in their kind, never reach’d the great celebrity of those works written by Charlotte, under the assum’d name of Currer Bell.” He seems to have been following exactly the drift of the critics, who heaped praise on Currer Bell’s book but were troubled or even disgusted by Ellis’s and not much impressed by Acton’s. How the world viewed such public performances mattered to Patrick Brontë very much.

  Emily and Anne were not well served by their publisher, and the copies of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that arrived just before Christmas proved to be cheaply produced and full of errors uncorrected from the proofs. Worse still, Newby had indulged in some chicanery in his advertising of the book, suggesting that it was by the author of Jane Eyre. The reception was mixed, and the coverage far less extensive than that of Currer Bell’s bestseller; reviewers seemed consternated by Wuthering Heights’s shocking violence and “abominable paganism”—even the multiple narrators unsettled them. Not all the judgements were negative, however. The force and originality of Ellis Bell’s book were indisputable, as was the mind behind it, “of limited experience, but of original energy, and of a singular and distinctive cast,” as the critic in Britannia said, while Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly recognised that the author “wants but the practised skill to make a great artist.” Emily was gratified by these few but potent marks of recognition and kept cuttings of five reviews in her writing desk, including one unidentified one, the best of all, which praised the novel’s vital force and truth to “all the emotions and passions which agitate the restless bosom of humanity” and “talent of no common order.”

  Appearing as an adjunct to such a strange and powerful story, Agnes Grey never had a chance of being judged on its own merits. The Atlas, crushingly, said that, unlike Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey “left no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impression at all.” It also looked pallid in comparison with Currer Bell’s governess novel, which had in fact post-dated it.

  But the appearance of two more novelists called Bell—one of whom was wickedly sensational—made a prime subject of gossip. Though none of the published works bore any biographical information about the authors, it became generally understood that the Bells were brothers, possibly through Charlotte’s reference to them as “relatives” in her correspondence with publishers, and with the writers to whom she had sent Poems. One of those writers, J. G. Lockhart, seemed much more interested in the gossip than in the work they had sent him and passed on to his friend Elizabeth Rigby the news that the Bells were “brothers of the weaving order in some Lancashire town.” Another school of thought, fuelled by Newby’s false advertising, favoured the idea that “the Bells” were all one person.

  Meanwhile, Charlotte remained modest and cautious about her overnight success—and considerably better off, receiving a further cheque for £100 in February when the third edition was in preparation. For the second edition, she had decided to add a dedication: not to her “Master,” as formerly imagined, but to Thackeray, in homage to his effectiveness as a “social regenerator.” In a resounding preface, freighted with biblical allusions, she praised the dauntlessness and daring of the satirist who “comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital.” Thackeray was “the very master of that working corps [in which she clearly hoped to be counted herself] who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”

  Thackeray was of course “a total stranger” to Currer Bell, as she was careful to make clear in her dedication, but that didn’t prevent people wondering, when they read this very extravagant homage, if some more interesting relation was being concealed. Unknown to Charlotte, but known to many London literary people, Thackeray’s wife had had a mental breakdown some years before, and was cared for in reclusion in Camberwell, having been previously in a French asylum. The similarity to the Rochester–Bertha plot was irresistible to rumour-mongers, who began to say that Currer Bell must once have been a governess in Thackeray’s household—with the implication that Currer Bell must also have been his “chère amie.”

  When Charlotte heard of Thackeray’s circumstances, which she did from the man himself when he wrote to thank her for her dedication, she was completely mortified, and wrote to Williams of how “very, very sorry” she was for her “inadvertent blunder.” She had apologised to Thackeray, she told Williams, but with full awareness of how futile apologies were when such damage had been done. The incident illustrated for her how much she needed advice and guidance to deal with literary life at a distance.

  Her growing friendship with George Smith’s second-in-command, William Smith Williams, was one of the great pleasures that came to Charlotte through publication, and for almost a year she conducted a very open and lively correspondence with him in the person of the androgynous “Currer Bell,” with no revelation of her real name, sex or circumstances. The freedom that this gave her was unique in her life: she wrote to Williams not as a man or a woman, but the free spirit, unsnared, that her heroine Jane had defined and defended. Williams was forty-seven at the time, married and the father of eight children, ranging in age from their early twenties to a toddler. He had had many friends in the literary world: in his youth he had known Keats and Hazlitt, and had nursed ambitions to be a poet; Leigh Hunt was a lifelong friend; and, since joining Smith, Elder as literary adviser in 1845, he had made friends with Thackeray, Lewes and Ruskin. Unlike his boss, Smith, Williams wasn’t a particularly confident man, but discerning and sensitive, and with the time and inclination to correspond with Currer Bell on a range of topics that included contemporary politics, London literary life, ethics, female education and employment, industrialisation, religion and of course, predominantly, literature.

  From the frankness with which Currer Bell tackles the question in one letter of what Williams’s daughters might do to earn an independent living, it is clear that Williams had shared (in his missing side of the correspondence) many details of his family life and circumstances with his new correspondent, whoever “Currer Bell” was. He could hardly have been in serious doubt that the author of Jane Eyre and of these letters was a woman, but the fiction of her non-womanness was maintai
ned scrupulously in their early correspondence. It was in many respects the sort of relationship that Charlotte felt she ought to have had with Monsieur Heger, but which sexual attraction had fatally compromised in that instance. Williams had unbent so far as to share with Currer Bell his sense of failure and disappointment in his career—he was, in fact, a depressed and needy man under the skin, having worked for thirty-five years “in a position where your tastes had no scope, and your faculties no exercise.” As Currer perceived, “I feel that your cup of life must often have been a most bitter one—and I would fain say something consolatory without knowing very well how to express myself.” The simple sincerity of this must have endeared the writer to Williams very much indeed.

  Of course, as the months passed after the publication of Jane Eyre (which went into its third edition in April 1848), Smith, Elder were keen to hear if Currer Bell had a new work in mind, but the reclusive author reported that none of the three attempts made so far (as early as December 1847) were any good. Showing something of the persistence that her father had displayed over his rejection by Mary Burder, Charlotte/Currer then proposed yet again to Smith that he might think of publishing The Professor, in an enlarged and “recast” version. Looking over the manuscript, Bell had come to the conclusion that, although the beginning was feeble and the plot rather uneventful, the Belgian episodes were “as good as I can write.”