The Bronte Sisters

by Catherine Reef

  Textile mills, like this one in Morley, were a common sight in the towns of northern England in the mid-1800s.

  In Shirley, Brontë also looked into the lives of women, among them Moore’s distant cousin, Caroline Helstone. Caroline also lives in Stillborough. Her father is dead, and she knows nothing about her mother, who is thought to be alive. She was raised by her father’s brother, a cold, unfeeling man who has done his duty by her. Caroline secretly loves Robert Moore but doubts he cares for her in return. She believes she may never marry, and wanting a purpose in life, she thinks about pursuing the only occupation open to her: being a governess. Her uncle rejects this idea. He shelters and feeds and clothes her, so Caroline has no need to work, he says. He cannot see how the dull, empty hours hang heavily on a healthy young woman. Caroline worries, “What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads between me and the grave?”

  Brontë cared so much about a woman’s right to a full life that she stepped into the pages of Shirley to plead directly with the 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.” Worst of all for girls, Charlotte wrote, was having to act a part to gain a place in society through marriage. To the nation’s fathers she wrote, “You would wish to be proud of your daughters and not to blush for them—then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the maneuverer, the mischief-making tale-bearer.”

  Meanwhile, in Stillborough, another young woman has arrived. Shirley Keeldar owns property there, including an estate called Fieldhead. Her wealth gives her independence, which she cherishes. Shirley’s face, Brontë wrote, “possessed a charm as well described by the word grace as any other. It was pale naturally, but intelligent, and of varied expression.” Shirley has no parents and lives with a companion, Mrs. Pryor. This older woman had been Shirley’s governess when the mistress of Fieldhead was a child.

  A rich and beautiful woman like Shirley could easily attract a husband with money and a title, but she cares nothing about a man’s wealth or high position. To be her husband, a man must have a sharp mind and a good character, and he must treat her as an equal. She will never be the “half doll, half angel” that many men want in a wife. To Victorian readers, Shirley’s name symbolized the unusual freedom she enjoyed, which was like a man’s: before 1849, Shirley was a man’s name. But Shirley Keeldar made such a deep impression on some readers that they named their daughters after her. Before long, Shirley was transformed into a name for girls.

  Shirley likes Caroline, and the two women become friends. Strong-minded and with a large dog at her side, Shirley represents Emily Brontë as Charlotte imagined she might be had she lived. Although Charlotte mourned both her sisters, she missed Emily more. “I let Anne go to God, and felt He had a right to her,” she said. “I could hardly let Emily go. I wanted to hold her back then, and I want her back now.” Devout Anne had seemed destined for Heaven, but Emily had been firmly of the earth.

  A loan from Shirley helps Robert Moore fight back when workers launch an attack on his mill, and he makes sure its leaders are arrested. Robert has been spotted spending time with Shirley, and the people of Stillborough whisper that the two will be married. Caroline believes the rumor and grows ill. She steadily worsens, even under Mrs. Pryor’s tender care, and some people fear the worst. Caroline rallies only when Mrs. Pryor reveals a secret: she is really Mrs. James Helstone, Caroline’s mother.

  Caroline needs her health to look in on Robert Moore, who has been shot by someone seeking revenge for the Luddites’ arrest. By this time Robert has seen the squalid lives that many workers live, and he resolves to treat his employees well. Robert recovers as the government lifts the Orders in Council, reopening foreign markets to British manufacturers. Financially stable at last, he asks Caroline to be his wife.

  The right husband for Shirley steps forward, too. He is someone who has known her for years and has long loved her. “Am I to die without you, or am I to live for you?” he asks. Shirley replies, “Die without me if you will. Live for me if you dare.”

  The critics praised Shirley, although some complained that it lacked Jane Eyre’s mystery and romance. Currer Bell’s second novel delighted readers who had called the first one shocking and lurid, however. Shirley “enlists the purer sympathies of our nature, instead of appealing to its baser passions,” noted a writer for the Church of England Quarterly Review. But was the author a woman or a man?

  Charlotte Brontë may have lived a quiet, lonely life in remote Haworth, but the world was starting to figure out that she was Currer Bell. A rumor started in Keighley after someone at the post office opened a parcel for Charlotte from Smith, Elder and Company. Then Mary Taylor’s brother Joe learned of her authorship and spread the word through his part of Yorkshire. Finally, one of Charlotte’s old classmates from Roe Head recognized her in the pages of Jane Eyre; Currer Bell’s descriptions of Lowood sounded too much like Charlotte Brontë’s memories of Cowan Bridge to be a coincidence. This woman whispered her suspicion to the critic George Henry Lewes, and in his review of Shirley he identified the author as a clergyman’s daughter. He then assessed the novel as a woman’s book—doing just what Charlotte Brontë had guarded against. “The grand function of woman, it must always be recollected, is, and ever must be, Maternity,” he proclaimed. The man was impossible!

  Charlotte dashed off an angry letter to Lewes. “I wish all reviewers believed ‘Currer Bell’ to be a man—they would be more just to him,” Charlotte wrote. “You will, I know, keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex—where I am not what you consider graceful—you will condemn me.” As a novelist she refused to decide whether every sentence she wrote sounded “elegant and charming in femininity.” If society required this of her, then she would disappear from the world of books. “Out of obscurity I came,” she warned. “To obscurity I can easily return.”

  With the truth becoming known, though, and with Anne and Emily gone, Charlotte had less reason to hide. When George Smith and his mother invited her to stay with them in London, she accepted. She hired a dressmaker to sew her a proper city wardrobe—in black, because she mourned. She was earning money from her books and could afford to leave her country dresses at home.

  Smith’s mother and sisters welcomed Charlotte politely, and soon their reserve softened into friendship. George Smith escorted Charlotte to art galleries and plays. He hosted a dinner party for her, with William Makepeace Thackeray among the guests. This celebrated novelist, who stood more than six feet tall, had “a peculiar face—not handsome—very ugly indeed,” Charlotte wrote to her father. Thackeray was “stern in expression,” she added, “but capable also of a kind look.”

  William Makepeace Thackeray established himself as one of Victorian England’s leading novelists with the publication of Vanity Fair in 1847.

  Thackeray was struck by Brontë’s “trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes.” No one told him of Charlotte’s dual identity, but he figured out who she was. After dinner, when the men joined the women for coffee in the drawing room, as was the custom, he asked her if the “warning fragrance” of the gentlemen’s cigars had announced their approach, as Edward Rochester had asked Jane Eyre.

  Though Charlotte Brontë had dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, she admitted nothing that night. But she revealed herself a few days later to another celebrated writer, Harriet Martineau. A brilliant woman, Martineau had written books on education, economics, and travel. She had also authored a novel about a doctor, Deerbrook, that Charlotte had admired. When Charlotte learned that Martineau was staying with cousins in London, she wrote to request a meeting.

  Martineau had read Jane Eyre and Shirley and had even exchanged notes with Currer Bell. Like many curious readers, she was dying to know Bell’s identity. So she i
nvited Mr. Bell to Sunday tea. “I lighted plenty of candles that we might see what manner of man or womankind it was, & we sat in wondering expectation,” noted Lucy Martineau, one of Harriet’s cousins.

  Just before six there was a loud knock, and a man six feet tall strode into the room. He turned out to be a philanthropist who had come on some brief business, and Martineau wished he would finish it and be gone. No sooner did he leave than a carriage pulled up to the house, and a servant called out loudly, because Harriet Martineau had partial hearing loss, “Miss Brontë.”

  “I thought her the smallest creature I had ever seen (except at a fair),” wrote Martineau, who was tall, robust, and nearing fifty. “And her eyes blazed, as it seemed to me.” Seated beside Martineau on the sofa, Brontë “cast up at me such a look,—so loving, so appealing,—that, in connexion with her deep mourning dress,” Martineau recalled, “I could with the utmost difficulty return her smile, or keep my composure. I should have been heartily glad to cry.” Lucy Martineau volunteered, “She was so pleasant & so naïve, that is to say so innocent and un Londony that we were quite charmed with her.” After tea the two authors chatted alone, with Brontë speaking loudly into the horn that Martineau held to her ear. Brontë turned “red all over with pleasure” to hear Jane Eyre praised, Martineau said.

  The writer Harriet Martineau befriended Charlotte Brontë, but the friendship was short-lived.

  Charlotte Brontë went to London again in June 1850. On this trip she and George Smith attended a party at Thackeray’s home. Determined more than ever to make her reveal her secret, Thackeray introduced her to his other guests as Currer Bell. Charlotte corrected him smartly. According to another guest, she said that she “believed there were books being published by a person named Currer Bell . . . but the person he was talking to was Miss Brontë—and she saw no connection between the two.” As soon as she could, Charlotte fled the drawing room, where the guests had gathered, and sat in the study with the Thackerays’ governess. Miss Brontë “did not look pleasant,” Thackeray’s daughter Anne Ritchie recalled decades later. “I remember how she frowned at me whenever I looked at her.”

  Brontë also saw her hero, the Duke of Wellington, then eighty-one years old, when Smith took her to the chapel where the great man worshiped on Sundays. Smith and Brontë followed Wellington down the steps when the service ended, and they passed him twice on their morning stroll. “He is a real grand old man,” Charlotte said. On another day, she had lunch with George Henry Lewes, and he made her angry all over again by saying she had written “naughty books.” George Smith listened “with mingled admiration and alarm” to the “explosion” that followed, as Brontë defended her work with “indignant eloquence.” Later she told Ellen Nussey that she had trouble staying annoyed at Lewes, because his face was “so wonderfully like Emily.”

  While in London, Brontë sat for a portrait by George Richmond, who had studied art in Paris. Richmond created a flattering likeness of the novelist, emphasizing her soft, thick hair and soulful eyes. Her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls, went with Brontë to pick up the portrait when it was ready. As he admired the finished work, Brontë began to cry. “Oh, Mr. Richmond, it is so like Anne!” she said. When the portrait reached Haworth, Patrick Brontë declared that Richmond had captured the genius of the author of Shirley and Jane Eyre. Tabby Ayckroyd had a different opinion, however. She disliked the painting and complained that it made Charlotte look too old.

  The artist George Richmond created this flattering portrait of Charlotte Brontë. It has often been copied.

  Charlotte Brontë made other trips that summer. She went to Scotland with George Smith and one of his sisters to pick up a brother who was in school there. She loved Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, and called her days there “as happy almost as any I ever spent.” On a visit to a family named Kay-Shuttleworth, who had a home in Wordsworth’s Lake Country, she befriended another guest, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Brontë had read and admired Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton. And Gaskell, a married woman who had lost a beloved son, had read Jane Eyre and Shirley and understood that their author, too, had known grief. On boat and country carriage rides, the two women talked about books and life. “She and I quarreled & differed about almost everything,” Gaskell told another friend, “but we liked each other heartily.” From Haworth Brontë sent Gaskell a “little book of rhymes”: a copy of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

  In tune with the social issues of his time, the poet Matthew Arnold wrote in 1869, “My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century.”

  Then, in December, Charlotte spent “a cosy winter visit” with her other new friend, Harriet Martineau, at Martineau’s stone house on Lake Windermere, England’s largest lake. The energetic Martineau raised livestock and grew vegetables on her property. She took Brontë to meet the poet Matthew Arnold, who made a bad first impression. As he walked into the room with his chin held high, Brontë thought him to be self-important. Yet once she knew him better, she changed her mind. “Ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit,” she decided. Arnold, for his part, saw Brontë only as “past thirty and plain, with expressive gray eyes, though.”

  Arnold’s moving 1867 poem “Dover Beach” would capture the uncertainty of many Victorians as Darwin’s writings on natural selection forced them to reconsider long-held beliefs:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  One person who had rejected the faith of her forebears was Harriet Martineau. When she read aloud to Charlotte from a book she was writing, Letters on the Law of Man’s Social Nature and Development, in which she championed atheism, Brontë hardly knew how to respond. “The strangest thing is that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank,” reflected Charlotte, who had known so much grief, “to welcome this unutterable desolation as a pleasant state of freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do it if he could?”

  Charlotte’s own faith remained unshaken, and when her father, Ellen Nussey, and even Miss Wooler chided her for staying in the home of an admitted atheist, she defended her new friend. “My dear Miss Wooler—I believe if you were in my place, and knew Miss Martineau as I do—if you had shared with me the proofs of her rough but genuine kindness,” she wrote, “you would be the last to give her up; you would separate the sinner from the sin.”

  In later life, Charlotte’s old teacher Margaret Wooler exchanged her white dresses for darker garments.

  While traveling and meeting well-known people like Harriet Martineau and Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë no longer hid the fact that she was Currer Bell. A new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey had just been published, for which Charlotte had written a “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell.” In this preface she told the world that the Bells were three sisters, and she revealed the names of Emily and Anne. Charlotte wrote, “For strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.”

  ten

  “I Should Fancy I Heard the Steps of the Dead”

  IN January 1851, George Smith invited Charlotte Brontë to cruise with him on the Rhine River, which flows through modern-day Germany. Thoughts of travel always stirred up longing in Charlotte’s soul, yet she worried that London would gossip. In the end, business forced Smith to cancel the plan, but Ellen Nussey sensed an “undercurrent” of feeling in his offer. She suspected that Smith had “fixed intentions” toward her f
riend.

  Romance seemed likely when the Smiths asked Charlotte to spend time with them in London, starting at the end of May. Again she had new clothes made, but this time her eye went to airy colors—white and pastel pink—and not strictly mourning black. The visit began on a merry note, with Charlotte noting that her fourth day in London, June 1, was “very happy.”

  George Smith may not have seen beauty when he looked at Charlotte Brontë, but he was attracted to her mind. He twice took her to see the French actress Mademoiselle Rachel perform onstage. Acclaimed for her tragic roles, Rachel counted famous men, including an illegitimate son of Napoleon, among her many lovers. For Charlotte Brontë, Rachel on the stage was “a wonderful sight—‘terrible as if the earth had cracked deep at your feet.’”

  A peddler’s daughter, the performer known as Rachel first acted onstage to support her family. She died of tuberculosis in 1858, at age thirty-six.

  Charlotte was also one of the six million Britons who toured the Great Exhibition of 1851, a proud celebration of the triumphs of technology. Within the Crystal Palace, the mammoth glass building that housed the great display, people could see “every possible invention and appliance for the service of man,” according to a guidebook, “every realization of human genius, every effort of human industry.” The more than one hundred thousand exhibits had come from Britain and countries around the world. Visitors saw ores pulled from deep in the earth, machines that wove cotton cloth, timber from Canada, handcrafts from Tunisia, and a stuffed elephant from India. Charlotte went twice and told her father, “It seems as if magic only could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the Earth—as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus—with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect.”