In Search of Anne Brontë

by Nick Holland

  My youngest sister quietly produced some of her own compositions, intimating that since Emily’s had given me pleasure, I might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge, yet I thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own.15

  Emily was now caught in a dilemma. She had no desire to see her own poems published and held up for the world’s approbation or disapproval, yet she would relish the opportunity of making Anne happy. Charlotte explained that she too could contribute some verses, and that they could try to have them published together. It would be like the school project again, with the three sisters working together for one common purpose.

  Finally, after days of anguish, Emily consented, but on one condition: she would only allow her work to be published if it was done under a pseudonym. Her greatest fear was that people who knew her would read the poetry and by doing so gain an insight into the private feelings that she was always so careful to conceal.

  The plan was now launched, and the sisters would spend evenings walking around the dining table, talking in hushed voices and considering the merits of one poem against another. Even Emily was excited now, and for Anne it was at last a relieving moment of happiness in what had been a dark succession of years. When deciding upon their pseudonym they chose to keep their own initials intact, that would be their secret joke on a world that could never penetrate it. They also decided to take on male names. Anne, more than any of them, had seen the different way that society treated men and women; if they wanted to be taken seriously, she told Charlotte and Emily, they would have to publish under men’s names.

  After running through various options, they decided on Currer Bell for Charlotte, Ellis Bell for Emily and Acton Bell for Anne. It was then time to collate their work. Each sister had a huge body of poems to select from, and in the end it was decided that Emily and Anne would contribute twenty-one poems each, and Charlotte, whose verse tended to be longer in length, would contribute nineteen. Anne’s poetry was a mixture of Gondal compositions, with overtly Gondalian references removed, and her work that was inspired by Weightman, her battle for faith and life in the real world.

  The poems were copied out by hand by the three Brontës, and each was then signed Acton, Currer or Ellis. The poems would alternate between the sisters, and Anne’s first contribution to the collection is ‘A Reminiscence’. The very first poem that Anne was placing before the world was one of her paeans to Weightman:

  Yes! thou art gone! and never more

  Thy sunny smile shall gladden me;

  But I may pass the old church door.

  And pace the floor that covers thee,

  May stand upon the cold, damp stone,

  And think that, frozen, lies below

  The lightest heart that I have known

  The kindest I shall ever know.

  Yet, though I cannot see thee more,

  ’Tis still a comfort to have seen;

  And though thy transient life is o’er.

  ’Tis sweet to think that thou hast been;

  To think a soul so near divine,

  Within a form, so angel fair,

  United to a heart like thine,

  Has gladdened once our humble sphere.16

  Charlotte took charge of sending their work out into the world, from whence it rapidly returned bearing a string of terse rejection notes, until one publisher suggested that the brothers Bell send it to a specialist poetry press called Aylott & Jones. This the sisters did, and they were delighted with the reply that they would publish the work, but it would have to be at the sisters’ expense.

  With their aunt’s legacy still in place, untouched by the abandoned plans for a school, they had no difficulty in finding the £31 and 10s that the publishers asked for, and no hesitation in sending it. Two months later, in May 1846, Anne proudly held a first copy of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in her hands. Things would never be the same again for Anne, her sisters or English literature.

  Notes

  1. Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, p.195

  2. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 2, p.224

  3. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.461

  4. Ibid.

  5. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.460

  6. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.150

  7. Orel, Harold, The Brontës: Interviews and Recollections, pp.61–2

  8. Brontë, Anne, Agnes Grey, p.109

  9. Brontë, Anne, Agnes Grey, p.91

  10. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 2, p.92

  11. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 29 December 1881

  12. The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, p.492

  13. The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, p.490

  14. Brontë, Charlotte, Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, p.1

  15. Brontë, Charlotte, Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, p.2

  16. Bell, C., E., & A., Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, p.10

  12

  THE TRUE HISTORY OF AGNES GREY

  All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself.

  Agnes Grey

  Finally, with the publication of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the sisters had seen a collaborative plan reach fruition. This was the culmination of the past twenty-six years; it was what they had been born for. As with all families, they’d had their ups and downs, misunderstandings, moments of resentment and of jealousy, but their filial bounds were too strong to be broken. Yet there was still one family member who was not included in the venture: Branwell, who had himself been the first of the Brontë children to appear in print.

  Branwell had been a keen poet in his youth, as well as a talented draughtsman and artist, and he had often sent poetry to local newspapers under the pen name of Northangerland, one of the characters from the tales of Angria. On 5 June 1841, the Halifax Guardian published Northangerland’s ‘Heaven And Earth’.1 The choice of topic is surprising, as Branwell examines the illuminating power of heaven in contrast to the dreary earth. In truth, Branwell had long since abandoned his faith, suggesting that this poem had been composed many years previously. In total, the Halifax Guardian would publish twelve of his poems, and his work was also published in the Leeds Intelligencer, the Bradford Herald and the Yorkshire Gazette. This in itself was no mean feat, as these papers prided themselves on the quality of the poetry they published.

  It says a lot, then, that despite his earlier proficiency in poetry, and despite his success in this field, he was not even consulted when it came to compiling a book of Brontë poetry. The sad truth was that by this time he had already entered into an unstoppable decline, where all he cared about was drink, laudanum and Mrs Lydia Robinson. He might still be living at the top of Main Street, but he was careering down the hill, and the brakes were off.

  Branwell never knew that his sisters were creating a book of poetry, he was oblivious to the fact that it had been published, and he wasn’t the only one. Their father’s eyesight had grown steadily worse, and he was now suffering from cataracts that made him nearly blind. Tabby Aykroyd was back working in the parsonage again, but she was less than mobile and was there more as an act of kindness on the part of the sisters than anything else. In these circumstances it was easy for Charlotte to collect and sort the post without anyone other than Anne and Emily knowing anything about it.

  It was a moment of intense pride for the Brontë girls as they saw the product of their own minds in print for the first time, but each of them had their own individual view of the finished product. Emily still felt a sense of intrusion and worried what others would thi
nk if they ever found out that she was Ellis Bell. Charlotte was racked by insecurity: from the days of her youth she had wanted to be a poet more than anything else, as she had confided in a teenage letter to the Poet Laureate of the time Robert Southey, but now that her poetry was in print she could not escape the fact that her verse was not as good or as mature as that produced by her two younger sisters. Anne kept her feelings to herself as she had always done, but inside she felt a sense of victory. Dear little Anne, the fragile girl who could not be trusted even to do the housework alone, had shown the world what she could do, and she saw it was good. She had disclosed some of her most private feelings, and yet nobody would ever penetrate her reserve or assign them to her.

  This made her inner triumph even greater, and there was nothing that Anne valued higher than her ability to conceal her emotions from even those closest to her. Anne makes this clear in the ending to her penultimate contribution to the Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, ‘Self Congratulation’, where she talks about the ability to hide her feelings when her loved one walks by:

  But, thank God! You might gaze on mine

  For hours and never know

  The secret changes of my soul

  From joy to keenest woe.

  Last night, as we sat round the fire

  Conversing merrily,

  We heard, without, approaching steps

  Of one well known to me!

  There was no trembling in my voice,

  No blush upon my cheek,

  No lustrous sparkle in my eyes,

  Of hope, or joy, to speak;

  But, oh! my spirit burned within,

  My heart beat full and fast!

  He came not nigh – he went away –

  And then my joy was past.

  And yet my comrades marked it not:

  My voice was still the same;

  They saw me smile, and o’er my face

  No signs of sadness came.

  They little knew my hidden thoughts;

  And they will never know

  The aching anguish of my heart,

  The bitter burning woe!2

  On one occasion, however, we hear how Anne’s emotions were betrayed by the merest hint of an upturned smile, and it was the visiting Ellen Nussey who caught her out. In December 1848 Ellen was visiting Haworth Parsonage to provide support and comfort for Charlotte and Anne at a time of mourning. Anne was sitting by the fireside reading a newspaper, when Ellen was surprised to see Anne’s countenance change: ‘I observed a slow smile spreading across Anne’s face as she sat reading before the fire. I asked her why she was smiling, and she replied: “Only because I see they have inserted one of my poems.”’3

  The publication could have been either the Leeds Intelligencer or Fraser’s Magazine, as both that month had published her poem ‘The Narrow Way’, a beautifully heartfelt hymn that preaches her familiar gospel of enduring all calumnies and holding on to faith. The prestigious Fraser’s Magazine had even earlier published her long poem of religious reflection ‘The Three Guides’. In fact, whilst Emily’s undoubted mastery of verse often sees her hailed as the best Brontë poet, Anne was the only sister who had her poetry published independently, and without having to pay for it.

  From Ellen’s observation we see how even in December 1848, a time of personal despair for Anne, she could still find some delight in achieving recognition for her poetry. On that May day in 1846 when they held the first copies of their book, all three sisters harboured expectations of its success, yet they were to be disappointed.

  They first had to make additional payments to their publisher to ensure that review copies could be sent to regional and national publications. Thrillingly for Anne and her sisters it gathered generally favourable reviews, including from influential magazines The Critic and The Athenaeum, yet still it failed to garner the sales they had hoped for.

  It was Charlotte, reverting to her usual mother role, who took charge of the production of the book, and it was she who asked Aylott & Jones to produce a print run of 1,000 copies, double the amount that Matthew Arnold, as an example, had enjoyed for his early works. This was wildly ambitious, or naive, as poetry was in decline by the 1840s. The first decades of the century had seen a rapid increase in poetry sales, thanks to the likes of Wordsworth and Byron, but the bubble had burst. By 1846, even established greats like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Wordsworth himself were finding it hard to get their work into print and then on to bookshelves.

  Anne and her sisters would have sat around their dining table at night, reading the reviews by candlelight, passing them eagerly from one pair of hands to another. It was a secret that they still kept from their family, but it also remained stubbornly a secret to the wider world. The £2 they had allocated for an advertising budget was not enough to bring it to the attention of the reading public, and although they considered spending a further £10 on advertising, it seems that this money was never actually committed.

  A famous letter from Charlotte to Thomas de Quincey on 16 June 1847 reveals the fate of the book:

  My relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of publishing a volume of poems. The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed of but two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in disposing of those two, himself only knows.4

  Thomas de Quincey was not the only writer to receive a similar letter along with a copy of the book, an act that the sisters, via Charlotte, said was to prevent the books being transferred to ‘trunk makers’, the final fate of unsold books. What is less known, however, is that this was not the eventual fate of the Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and that all copies of the book were eventually disposed of. In 1848, Charlotte’s then publisher, Smith, Elder & Co., purchased the remaining 961 books from Aylott & Jones for the sum of 6d each. Thus it was that the sisters finally received the sum of over £24 from Aylott & Jones as return on their initial outlay. Over time, Smith, Elder & Co. managed to sell every last copy of the book.5

  Charlotte’s letter is written in a jocular tone, and this itself tells us all about the sisters’ attitude at this time. They are not disheartened by the lack of sales of the book, indeed one of the purchasers, a Mr Enoch, loved the work so much that he wrote, via the publisher, asking for the autographs of the Bell brothers. These signatures were duly sent to Aylott & Jones, with the proviso that they were forwarded on from London so that nobody could find out their true location.

  If the act of publishing poetry had failed to provide a financial return, it had provided a thrilling experience for Charlotte and Anne, and even Emily had been caught up in the excitement once she had assured herself that her anonymity would remain intact. The reviews, and the praise of Mr Enoch, showed them that it wasn’t their writing that was at fault, but merely the medium they had chosen.

  As soon as their poetry had been sent to Aylott & Jones, even before it had been published, their minds had turned to their next project. All three sisters had written both poetry and prose since their childhood, and Anne in particular had already been working on a prose treatment. In her 1845 diary paper, she writes, ‘I have begun the third volume of passages in the life of an Individual. I wish I had finished it.’6

  There is the possibility that this ‘life of an Individual’ is one of the Gondal stories that she wrote, but it was very unusual for her to write on purely Gondal themes when apart from Emily, and at this time she was still at Thorp Green Hall. It seems much more likely that the book she talks of is in fact an early version of Agnes Grey. Whilst the book as we know it now is one relatively slim volume, it does contain three distinct sections: life with the Bloomfields, life with the Murrays and life at the school her mother founds. Whilst the first two sections are based heavily on Anne’s time with the Ingham and Robinson families, the final o
ne is an intensely personal look into her dreams and wishes. It was for that reason she found it particularly hard to write, and wished that she had finished it.

  Despite the heartache that writing this final section induced, writing in general was a sheer joy for Anne. It was something she had always done, firstly in conjunction with Emily and latterly on her own. She could never be completely lonely with a pen and paper to hand, and with characters and stories in her mind just waiting to be released. It is doubtful that she ever anticipated writing novels for public consumption, but this was just what Charlotte proposed one evening as they discussed the prospects for their poetry collection.

  What was there to risk? They now had more experience of the publishing process, and determined that this time they would not pay for publication themselves, as they had with their poems. The atmosphere in their house was becoming increasingly dark and strained, thanks to the physical darkness their father found himself in and the mental darkness into which their brother had descended, but writing together gave the sisters moments of light and joy at the day’s end. It was a return to their joyful days of childhood, even if one member of that creative quartet could no longer take part.

  A new plan was quickly formed and agreed upon: the sisters would each write a novel, and the three novels would then be sent to publishers with a view to them being published together. In this way they hoped to make their novels more appealing to a prospective publisher. Books were an expensive item in the mid-nineteenth century and could cost around a month’s salary for a domestic maid. The most common way for books to be read, and distributed, was through a circulating library. To maximise their revenue from this route, publishers would prefer to publish a book in three volumes rather than one, trebling the income they would receive from the libraries.