Brontë’s father had two principal reasons for his angry rejection of this proposal. The first was that it seemed to him his junior assistant was working behind his back and without his agreement. The second was that Nicholls was in every way inferior to his daughter. As she put it to Ellen, he told her “the match would be a degradation—that I should be throwing myself away.” Charlotte refused him. Nicholls continued in his clerical duties, treated with icy silence by her father. Charlotte found herself feeling that “silent pity is just all I can give him.” As time passed and she felt more and more sympathy for the man—and perhaps defiance at her father’s effort to control her life—she confessed to Ellen that she had begun to fear that she might lose “the purest gem . . . the most precious - life can give – genuine attachment.” Meanwhile Nicholls agreed to leave for another posting. Just before his departure Charlotte met him, “leaning against the garden-door in a paroxysm of anguish - sobbing as women never sob.” Though exiled, Nicholls nevertheless corresponded with her. While he was visiting some friends in the neighborhood early in 1854, they would meet on a country lane to talk together. By February Patrick acceded to Charlotte’s demands, and Nicholls began to visit the Haworth parsonage again. On June 29, 1854, they were married.
What ensued was perhaps the happiest time in Brontë’s life. The married couple traveled to Ireland to meet Nicholls’ family. There, friends and servants told Charlotte, “I have got one of the best gentlemen in the country.” She was impressed by the splendid home of his uncle where Arthur had been raised. They continued to the west of Ireland where Charlotte was struck by its wild beauty. She was spellbound when on cliffs overlooking the Atlantic she watched the waves sweep to the shore, and she told her new husband she wished to stay there for a while. Silently taking in the scene, he covered her up with a rug “to keep off the spray,” only holding her back when she went “near the edge of the cliff.” Later Charlotte wrote to Ellen of “the kind and ceaseless protection which has ever surrounded me,” as Nicholls assiduously cared for her well-being.
Back home at Haworth, the married couple, now living in the parsonage together, Nicholls became caught up again in his daily duties. Charlotte found her life very changed. He needed her help, and she found that “to be wanted continually, to be constantly called for and occupied seems so strange; yet it is a marvelously good thing.” In her letters, the woman who had for so many decades imagined and longed for the love of “my Master,” now writes joyfully of “my dear boy.”
Then, with cruel swiftness, there came a change. On January 19 Charlotte writes to Ellen that for ten days, that is, since January 9, she has had stomach problems and is sometimes faint. “I certainly never before felt as I have done lately.” On January 30, a local doctor confirms she is pregnant. By February 14 Nicholls is writing to Ellen that Charlotte is “completely prostrated with weakness and sickness and frequent fever.” At about the same time, Charlotte wrote to her friend Amelia Taylor, who had recently given birth, about her condition: “Sickness with scarce a reprieve—I strain until what I vomit is mixed with blood.” She wrote another friend about Nicholls, “No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness.” And so she wasted away, becoming skeletally thin, her hands seemingly transparent. She could no longer hold a pencil. She died on March 31, 1855. Her father quietly, and perhaps bitterly, remarked to a servant, “I always told you Martha, that there was no sense in Charlotte marrying at all, for she was not strong enough for marriage.”
For six years Nicholls remained at Haworth carrying on with the ill-paid, subsidiary job of curate, aiding the aging Patrick in his clerical duties. On his death in June of 1861, Charlotte’s father left his entire estate, as had she, to the Rev. Nicholls. He returned to Banagher in the north of Ireland taking Charlotte’s “dresses and manuscripts and drawings—which,” as Winifred Gèrin notes, “he refused to regard as anything but tender keepsakes concerning none but himself.” Nicholls married a second time, to a cousin, and lived until December 3, 1906.
For most of her life Charlotte Brontë lived two lives. She was the docile, hardworking, and disciplined child of a Yorkshire clergyman following the rules and practices of her time and place. At the same time she lived an extravagant, rebellious, sensuous, and powerfully emotional life in her imagination. This she projected first through the voluminous unpublished writing of her early years. Later, through her four published novels, she invented that complex interplay of the “truthful” record of observation and experience merged with the bright projections of her dreams and her longings that became the mark of her genius.
Everything about the external physical appearance of Charlotte Brontë—the stunted growth, the pale skin, the bad teeth—can be at least partially accounted for by the strains of her past, even as her tiny body and plain face won her sympathy and lifelong friends. While it had been in one way a very painful, strange, and damaged life, in another it had been frequently blissfully happy and nurturing. The novels record these disparities that gave her the character, like her heroines, to succeed in pursuing her own way.
Charlotte’s reserve, her clear, penetrating gaze, her aloof demeanor, as well as her sharp-tongue, were a part of a thorny defense mechanism she had created to deal with the inferiority of the roles she was forced to play, which she indignantly knew to be unfair, and which she abandoned as quickly as she could.
Secrecy, an “‘Ostrich-longing for concealment’ as she called it,” had indeed been an important theme even in her earlier, unpublished writing. Her heroine Elizabeth Hastings in many ways, as we have seen, much like Brontë herself, seemed “an insignificant, unattractive young woman” though she secretly concealed “intense emotions . . . always smothered under diffidence and prudence and a skillful address.” In that dynamic we find both the truth of the drab realism of daily life as lived by a young, mid-Victorian woman and the powerful inner life bred by imagination and making claim to an equal kind of truth, the truth of inner experience felt as violent, painful, and in itself real.
Charlotte, on the first page of her 1846 novel The Professor, wrote of “what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts” that no one suspects to be “casketing such treasures.” In a poem probably from that same year she uses the same key term:
The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;—
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
The paradox is that as a writer she revealed those hidden treasures of thought, hope, dream, and pleasure, but sought to protect herself from the damage of public scrutiny by concealing the autobiographical roots through the strategies of fiction. As these pages show, Jane Eyre is “An Autobiography.” A liberation of Brontë’s inner life—and much of her lived experience—recounted according to the “dictation” of an eloquent and urgent imagination.
When the well-known critic Harriet Martineau visited the family home in Haworth in later years, after the death of Charlotte’s brother and two sisters, at a time when the novelist was living alone with Patrick, she felt “something inexpressibly affecting in the aspect of the frail little creature who had done such wonderful things, and who was able to bear up, with so bright an eye and so composed a countenance, under not only such a weight of sorrow, but such a prospect of solitude. In her deep mourning dress (neat as a Quaker’s), with her beautiful hair, smooth and brown, her fine eyes, and her sensible face indicating a habit of self-control, she seemed a perfect household image.” Reading Jane Eyre we know how much of a personal victory Brontë had achieved through that self-control and how many secrets her composed countenance had concealed.
Acknowledgments
Lauren Clark of Kuhn Projects initially suggested that I investigate “how” Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, and I am indebted to her for her faith and hard w
ork in making the project real. Amy Cherry and her colleague Remy Cawley at W. W. Norton believed in this book and worked tirelessly to improve it.
Everyone studying the life and work of Charlotte Brontë is indebted to the scholarship and wisdom of Elizabeth Gaskell, Winifrith Gérin, Juliet Barker, and Claire Harmon for their biographies of this complex woman. Thanks to the incredible industry of Christine Alexander, Victor A. Neufeldt, and Heather Glen we now have reliable texts of the Brontë juvenilia. And everyone working the field is indebted to Margaret Smith for her magisterial edition of the letters.
I’m very grateful for the help in researching this book of two generous Georgetown students, Marielle Hampe and Emily Coccia. Carole Sargent offered important publishing advice, and from the Lauinger Library Melissa Jones and Meg Oakley offered invaluable insight and assistance. Karen Lautman gave invaluable help in arranging for needed funding. Many colleagues in the Georgetown English Department offered generous encouragement.
My dear wife Sissy Seiwald carried me through the years of work on this book with patience and love, and it makes me very happy to be able to dedicate it to her.
Notes
THE TEXT OF JANE EYRE
Quotations from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre come from Richard J. Dunn’s edition of the novel (W. W. Norton: New York, 2001), and page numbers are cited in the endnotes by a key phrase taken from the beginning of the paragraph in question as JE and the page number.
This volume is also the source for further texts, such as selections from Brontë’s “Roe Head Journal,” which are cited in key-phrase endnotes as JE and the page number.
ENDNOTES
Other endnotes for each chapter using key phrases from later in a given paragraph cite sources and provide further information.
Endnotes referring to a second citation for a source infrequently used cite its author and a page reference. For example, “Johnson 149.”
Endnotes for all correspondence cite the writer of the letter and then its recipient using abbreviations for names. Hence a letter from Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey is cited as, for example, CB to EN Letters I, 184.
Abbreviations: Correspondents
CB Charlotte Brontë
BB Branwell Brontë
CH Constantin Heger
EB Emily Brontë
EG Elizabeth Gaskell
EN Ellen Nussey
GS George Smith
HC Hartley Coleridge
HN Henry Nussey
MW Margaret Wooler
RS Robert Southey
WSW William Smith Wilson
Abbreviations: Frequently Used Sources
AB AG Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Allott Miriam Allott, The Brontës. The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974).
CA EW Christine Alexander ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 1992).
CA SW Christine Alexander ed., The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal. Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Catalogue Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
CB High Life Charlotte Brontë, High Life in Verdopolis, ed. Christine Alexander (London: British Library, 1995).
CB TP Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
CH Clare Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart (New York: Knopf, 2016).
Chitham Edward Chitham, A Brontë Family Chronology (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
EG Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
HG Heather Glen, ed., Charlotte Brontë Tales of Angria (London: Penguin, 2006).
JB Julia Barker, The Brontës (New York: Pegasus, 2013).
JE Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Norton Critical Edition, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
Letters Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Brontë with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Volume I: 1829–1847 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Volume II: 1848–1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Volume III: 1852–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Lonoff Sue Lonoff, ed., The Belgian Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
N CBP Victor A. Neufeldt, The Poems of Charlotte Brontë, A New Text and Commentary (New York: Garland, 1985).
N PPBB Victor A. Neufeldt, The Poems of Patrick Branwell Brontë (New York: Garland, 1990).
N WPBB Victor A. Neufeldt, The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë Volume I (New York: Garland, 1997), Volume II (New York: Garland, 1999).
Orel Harold Orel, The Brontës. Interviews and Recollections (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997).
Ox Comp Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Poems 1846 Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (Hannah Wilson, 2015).
WG Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
INTRODUCTION
11 “Eyes with tears.” Allott, 69, 67–68.
12 “Under cover to Miss Brontë.” CB to Smith, Elder and Co., Letters I, 533.
13 Far more complicated. Dated by her 19 September 1850, published 7 December 1850 Chitham 214; Orel 133ff. See also Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 307, 312.
13 “Into a fortress.” JB 797; Orel 99.
15 Twenty-first-century. CB to CH, Letters I, 379–80.
CHAPTER ONE
22 Become Jane Eyre. B to CH, Letters I, 379.
22 As we shall see. JE 378.
23 Risk-taking heroine. CB to WSW, Letters I, 546.
25 Their own rights. JE 444–45. A friend of many distinguished Victorian writers and intellectuals and a novelist in his own right, Lewes was to begin living with the writer Mary Ann Evans in 1854 and encouraged her to write fiction under the pseudonym George Eliot.
25 It is thus a book. JE 295, emphasis added.
26 Intensity was always there. HG 258.
27 A “very limited” life. JE 26.
27 There are other. JE 298, 316.
03 She had sought. See Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973), 75. EG 247.
31 “Sin and Suffering . . .” See Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, eds. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), xi–xii. CB to EN, Letters I, 497.
31 More real than life. Allott 303–4. EG 245–46.
32 “May be already defective.” In rejecting Charlotte’s earlier novel The Professor the editors at Smith, Elder had expressed an interest in seeing another novel, and she promised them this would be “of a more striking and exciting character.” CB to Smith, Elder and Co., Letters I, 535, 539.
CHAPTER TWO
33 “Ten times a day.” WG 327. CB to EN, Letters I, 492. EG 245. WG 328. CB to EN, Letters I, 500.
34 Curt note of rejection. CB to EN, Letters I, 493, 498.
34 “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” JE 5.
34 Jane goes on. JE 12, 19. CB to EN, Letters I, 284.
35 As the story begins. JE 5–6.
36 “The Roe Head Journal.” JE 404–5.
36 Private and secret reveries. JE 399.
37 Her sexual longing. JE 422.
37 Inappropriate for a young woman. CB to EN, Letters I, 144.
37 This book is crucial. JE 216.
37 What is happening to her. “By the time she wrote Jane Eyre, Charlotte was convinced of the importance of the pictorial image in stimulating the creative process. Jane’s experi
ence confirms the way pictures tell a story, not always of the physical world but of the psychological. There is no moment where she is aware of a conceptual leap from copying to imaginative painting, but her author uses this significant creative advance to indicate Jane’s inner reality.” Christine Alexander, “Educating ‘The Artist’s Eye’: Charlotte Brontë and the Pictorial Image,” in The Brontës in the World of the Arts, eds. Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 28.
39 Through the moors near death. Dated 27 November 1832. N CBP 100, lines 9–12.
39 “Lustre cold and bright.” N CBP, 101, lines 37–38, 45–48.
39 Ancient isolated pillar. N CBP 102, lines 75–76.
39 And so when Charlotte. JE 5, 6–7.
40 “Explained it very well.” EG 82.
41 Present in her description. Thomas Bewick, A History of British Birds, Volume II (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1885), 185.
41 As the list continues. JE 6.
41 Immanence of the diabolical. Thomas Bewick, A History of British Birds, Volume I (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1885), 103, 232. This may have suggested to Emily Brontë the scene in which Isabella Linton discovers Heathcliff has hung her lap dog.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 20
