Shirley needs her counterpart, suffering and sensitive Caroline Helstone, to earth her, and Caroline’s inactivity and repression are the most dynamic things in the book. Caroline is a creature of silences, concealing secret eloquence, a commentator who rarely gets to comment. One of her most rabble-rousing internal monologues culminates in something like a battle-cry: “Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids,—envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied.” But all this is thought, not uttered, and melts seamlessly into the narrator’s own commentary.
“What on earth is the matter with you?” Helstone asks his niece, anticipating Freud’s question “What do women want?” by some fifty years. Caroline tells him quite explicitly that she wants occupation— “I feel weaker than formerly. I believe I should have more to do”—but her uncle chooses to hear this as a typical example of female irrationality, and the course of action he proposes is to buy her a new frock. This is mirrored in a scene where the workman Joe Scott questions what interest Shirley can possibly have in the newspapers, and when she replies, “I read the leading articles, Joe, and the foreign intelligence, and I look over the market prices: in short, I read just what gentlemen read,” he looks at her “as if he thought this talk was like the chattering of a pie.”
Florence Nightingale, who had been impressed by the Bells’ Poems and by Jane Eyre,*3 read Currer Bell’s new novel as she was about to set off to study at the Institution of Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in 1850, following a long and painful struggle with her family for permission to find “necessary occupation.” The message of both Jane Eyre and Shirley was reflected in her own first publication the following year, in which she made a passionate case for action: “what are they to do with that thirst for action, useful action, which every woman feels who is not diseased in mind or body? God planted it there.” Shirley Keeldar was, like her, privileged, scholarly, strong-willed, and, like her, adopted a masculine outlook.*4 Currer Bell’s latest heroine may have spoken even more powerfully to Nightingale than the first, and her words “may well have been uppermost in Florence’s mind” as the young deaconess set out on the career that would lead her, within four years, to hospitals at Scutari and in the Crimea.
Contrary to plan, Charlotte couldn’t keep her Brussels experience out of the mix. It was still on her mind—perhaps more painfully than ever once bitterness and humiliation had replaced hope and waiting—and kept poking through into the text. Charlotte recast the rivalrous Crimsworth brothers of The Professor (with their long Angrian lineage) as Belgian immigrants in Yorkshire; Robert and Louis Gérard Moore—one of them a hard-nosed man of business, the other a sensitive scholar—along with their sister Hortense, retain many Continental habits and mannerisms. Robert likes to recite some of the poems that Monsieur Heger introduced to Charlotte back in 1842–3, while Louis, Shirley’s former tutor and now her not-very-secret admirer, reminisces about her brilliance as a student and recites, incredibly enough from memory, a devoir she once wrote for him on the subject of female genius. “[W]hat were the faults of that devoir?” Shirley asks, looking at all her tutor’s markings over her work. “What else did they denote?” “No matter now,” Louis replies meaningfully. Like Heger’s animated commentary on Charlotte’s essays, his marks obviously denote excitement, engagement and intellectual affinity, signs that Louis Moore sees retrospectively as evidence of love.
But more problematically, the novel bore the burden of Charlotte’s agony of bereavement. When she returned to the manuscript after the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne, it was to the chapter that opens the third volume, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” in which Caroline Helstone falls victim to an illness that is both a physical and a mental fever, a collapse in the face of sorrow. Her sense of imminent death makes her wonder what the departed soul will feel, if there is any hope of communication between the dead and the living, perhaps “electrical” influences in the atmosphere that can play “over our nerves like fingers on stringed instruments, and call forth now a sweet note, and now a wail.” Charlotte’s own wish to be haunted is clear, as are her fears, intensified so many fold by absolute severance from her sisters and brother:
Where is the other world? In what will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me?…Great Spirit! in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me—oh! give me FAITH!”
In the novel, the heroine survives this crisis with the discovery that her nurse, Mrs. Pryor, is her mother, long thought dead, and the scene ends in an exhausted and emotional silence as parent embraces child. But there was no such return and no such comfort for Charlotte.
—
ALMOST TWO YEARS AFTER Jane Eyre’s first publication, criticism of it was still appearing, and Charlotte still felt defensive about it. In August 1849 a review in the North British Review followed the by now common presumption that the “Bells” were one and the same, and concluded that Currer Bell, if a woman, “must be a woman pretty nearly unsexed.” Charlotte deeply resented the implied double standard, which it had been her objective to circumvent: “To such critics I would say—‘to you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’ ”
Worse than any remarks about her own work, though, were denigrations of her sisters’: the reviewer said he could not finish Wuthering Heights, he found it so disgusting, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not much better, with scenes of “naked vice” that he refused to believe possible among the gentry. Such lashing rebukes were “scarce supportable”; Charlotte was glad Emily and Anne weren’t alive to read them, but her anger on their behalf grew.
In the long months of reclusion, Charlotte felt she had been insufficiently vigilant of her own and her sisters’ reputations, and a notice in The Quarterly Review from December 1848, which had been perceived through the fog of Emily’s death, now seemed to require an answer urgently. In a long article, which first heaped praise on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the anonymous reviewer (Elizabeth Rigby, the friend with whom J. G. Lockhart had been exchanging gossip about the Bells) had lambasted Currer Bell for his vulgarity and, while admitting in passing many virtues of pace, style and feeling in the book, maintained a harsh and sarcastic attack on the debut novelist.
Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end…the impression she leaves on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.
Jane Eyre was a dangerous, “anti-Christian” book:
There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment—there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence—there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.
Howeve
r it was the passages that expressed disgust at Ellis Bell’s novel—“too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers”—that roused Charlotte to respond. Her anger on behalf of Emily was perfectly justified, but the nine-month delay in answering was not, nor was her idea—to address The Quarterly in a preface to her new book—a good one. The “Word to The Quarterly” that she drafted had an uncomfortably flippant tone, and targeted the most minor points raised, such as whether Currer Bell had an adequate knowledge of ladies’ fashion in the 1820s, which had convinced Rigby that the author of Jane Eyre was a man.
Smith and Williams did not like the piece at all and asked Charlotte to change it for something that would engage the public’s sympathies rather than stir up an image of a disgruntled carper. They were much more aware than she of her fame, and how such a display could damage her reputation, things for which Charlotte cared little at this stage. Smith believed that a preface that alluded to her personal circumstances and the deaths of Ellis and Acton Bell might provide a useful context to Shirley, but Charlotte dismissed such an idea severely. “What we deeply feel is our own—we must keep it to ourselves,” she told Williams. “Ellis and Acton Bell were, for me, Emily and Anne; my sisters—to me intimately near, tenderly dear—to the public they were nothing—beings speculated upon, misunderstood, misrepresented. If I live, the hour may come when the spirit will move me to speak of them, but it is not come yet.” In the meantime, Shirley went into print in October with no preface at all.
Elizabeth Rigby was hardly wrong in noticing Jane Eyre’s revolutionary bent, however much Charlotte remained in denial about it. When the second edition of Jane Eyre appeared early in 1848 (just as revolution was breaking out in France, Germany and Italy), a reviewer in the ultra-respectable Christian Remembrancer had accused the book of “moral Jacobinism” on every page. “Never was there a better hater,” the author said of the novel’s angry heroine; “ ‘Unjust, unjust,’ is the burden of every reflection upon the things and powers that be. All virtue is but well masked vice, all religious profession and conduct is but the whitening of the sepulchre.” It is easy to see how a book like Jane Eyre could strike readers as all the more subversive because of its surface conventionality. “To say that Jane Eyre is positively immoral or antichristian, would be to do its writer an injustice,” the Remembrancer concluded. “Still it wears a questionable aspect.”
Such interpretations made Charlotte very uncomfortable. As with her initial response to the 1848 revolutions, she seemed to regret exposing the warmth of her political sympathies and feared seeing her principles put too literally into action. She was very pleased with a review of Jane Eyre in the October 1848 edition of Revue des deux mondes, written by the Anglophile, anti-socialist journalist Eugène Forçade, who praised the Anglo-Saxon spirit of the book, “masculine, inured to suffering and hardship,” and felt that it spoke for itself, without having explicitly to call down “fiery judgment on society in a drama in which society nevertheless plays more or less the cruel and tyrannical role assigned to fate in the tragedies of antiquity.” For him, the novel was an interesting glimpse back at “the old order,” from the perspective of the fast-evolving nations of the Continent. It may have been a congenial order for many men, he said, but not for women, whom he compared as a class to the disaffected bourgeoisie: “they have not the same means of winning a place in the sun.”
Among the middle classes especially, how many girls belonging to the junior branch of the family, must decline through poverty to dependence and destitution! How often must one find, especially among these Englishwomen, that inner conflict, that fatality arising from their situation, so cruelly felt by our needy middle classes, and which grows out of a disharmony between birth, education and fortune.
Quite how he, or Currer Bell, felt that these insights would bolster “the old order” is hard to imagine.
—
CHARLOTTE HAD SAID back in July 1849 that, although she felt she might have lost any ability to enjoy society again, she did sometimes crave it, and a change of scene. Smith and Williams were keen to encourage her to come to London and engage with other writers; they understood how useful it might be to her critical reception as much as to her own well-being to emerge now and then from her Yorkshire fastness. Charlotte had no desire to go to parties and be lionised—in fact the idea filled her with revulsion—but being able to meet “some of the truly great literary characters” of the day, Thackeray, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, tempted her strongly. “However this is not to be yet—I cannot sacrifice my incognito—And let me be content with seclusion—it has its advantages. In general indeed I am tranquil—it is only now and then that a struggle disturbs me—that I wish for a wider world than Haworth.” Her isolation was problematic artistically, though, as she was aware on completion of Shirley. Until she heard from Williams that he liked the book, she had no confidence in it at all, not having been able to share it with her sisters, or with anybody.
Sometimes the gloom of home simply overwhelmed her, as on a day in September 1849 when both Tabby and Martha were ill, Tabby plagued with lameness again and Martha with an “internal inflammation” that Patrick Brontë unhelpfully opined might be life-threatening. Just as he was saying this, Charlotte heard Tabby call from the kitchen and rushed in to find the old servant collapsed on the floor with her head under the grate. Charlotte, who had a headache and felt sick herself, “fairly broke down for ten minutes—sat & cried like a fool,” as she told Ellen.
The publication of Shirley also left her very vulnerable, not just from some of the reviews, which she knew she took too much to heart (“Were my Sisters now alive they and I would laugh over this notice,” she told Williams of one slightly bad one), but from the frenzy of interest locally in the identity of Currer Bell, hugely provoked by the appearance of a book that was all about the West Riding, albeit thirty years in the past. Charlotte already suspected that her post was being opened on purpose in Keighley, and that her retirement was resented there. “[T]he gossiping inquisitiveness of small towns is rife…they are sadly puzzled to guess why I never visit, encourage no overtures to acquaintance, and always stay at home.” A visit to Ellen at Brookroyd that autumn alerted her, rather late in the day, to the fact that Jane Eyre “has been read all over the district,” and she was aware of people treating her differently. This was perturbing, as it meant she was losing her anonymity: “I met sometimes with new deference, with augmented kindness—old schoolfellows and old teachers too, greeted me with generous warmth—and again—ecclesiastical brows lowered thunder on me [because of the depiction of Carus Wilson in Jane Eyre]. When I confronted one or two large-made priests I longed for the battle to come on.”
To the disappointment of no longer being able to “walk invisible” was added the annoyance of Currer Bell’s gender always being a matter of concern to readers and critics. “Why can [the Press] not be content to take Currer Bell for a man?” she asked James Taylor, the editor at Smith, Elder with whom she had begun to correspond (and who had taken a special interest in Shirley, coming to the Parsonage in September to pick up the manuscript personally). “I imagined—mistakenly it now appears—that ‘Shirley’ bore fewer traces of a female hand than ‘Jane Eyre’: that I have misjudged disappoints me a little—though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.” The most aggravating judgement had come from her former champion, G. H. Lewes, whose review of Shirley in The Edinburgh Review criticised the coarseness of the book, and the inferiority of female creativity in general, concluding (in a reprise of what Robert Southey had said in 1837) that “the grand function of woman…is, and ever must be, Maternity.” Charlotte was so angry that she sent him a single sentence: “I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”
Even if they hadn’t read Jane Eyre, the reviewers all treated Shirley as a woman’s work, and harped annoyingly on speculation about the authoress. Gossip about Currer Bell had spread wide b
y this date, and from her sofa in the Casa Guidi in Florence Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to thank her friend Mary Russell Mitford for the latest snippet—that Jane Eyre had been written by a governess from Cowan Bridge School: “I certainly don’t think that the qualities, half savage and & half freethinking, expressed in ‘Jane Eyre,’ are likely to suit a model governess,” the poet observed wryly. “Your account falls like dew upon the parched curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom (as mere gossip…) I couldn’t resist the temptation of communicating it. People are so curious…about this particular authorship.”
A similarly avid interest in Currer Bell’s identity was shown by Harriet Martineau, a novelist who had much in common with Charlotte. Martineau, who came from an intellectually distinguished Unitarian family, had come to notice in the 1830s with her essays on social reform, Illustrations of Political Economy, and her bestselling novel, Deerbrook. Charlotte was an admirer of the novel and in tribute sent Martineau a copy of Shirley on publication. Little did she imagine how closely the accompanying note would be examined by its recipient for clues as to Currer Bell’s sex. “The hand was a cramped and nervous one,” Martineau recalled in her autobiography, “which might belong to any body who had written too much, or was in bad health, or who had been badly taught.” Martineau had noticed what might or might not have been a genuine slip of the pen when Currer Bell changed the pronoun “she” to “he” in his/her covering letter, but was convinced anyway, from some domestic details in Jane Eyre, that the author could only have been a woman. She therefore addressed her reply on the outside to “Currer Bell Esqre” but began it “Madam.”
There was no point struggling too long against this tide, especially when it brought with it very welcome messages such as the one that Smith, Elder forwarded in November from Elizabeth Gaskell, praising Shirley in such generous and sympathetic terms that it brought tears to Charlotte’s eyes. “She said I was not to answer it—but I cannot help doing so,” Charlotte told Williams. “[S]he is a good—she is a great woman—proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell’s nature—it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my Sister Emily—in Miss Martineau’s mind I have always felt the same—though there are wide differences—Both these ladies are above me—certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience—I think I could look up to them if I knew them.” In her reply to Mrs. Gaskell, Currer Bell used the female pronoun without demur.
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