The unspoken thought was implicit in every line – this was not how Charlotte had been accustomed to write.
Despite her apparent deference to the gentlemen of Smith, Elder & Co., Charlotte was quite capable of standing her own ground and defying them. She had already refused to replace the first chapter. Now, when Williams added his weight to James Taylor’s criticisms of the episode of Shirley’s nervousness after she had been bitten by a supposedly mad dog, Charlotte admitted the justice of their remarks: ‘the thing is badly managed – and I bend my head and expect in resignation what, here, I know I deserve – the lash of criticism’, but added, ‘I cannot alter now. It sounds absurd but so it is.’ ‘I can work indefatigably at the correction of a work before it leaves my hands,’ she told Williams, ‘but when once I have looked on it as completed and submitted to the inspection of others – it becomes next to impossible to alter or amend.’18 The only major concession she made was to substitute a translation for the French devoir she had written as a specimen of Shirley’s work for Louis Moore. Since this alteration had not been specifically requested, though Williams had observed that the French in Shirley might be cavilled at, Charlotte seems to have decided on it unilaterally fearing it might be thought pretentious.19
On only one point did Charlotte and Cornhill lock horns, and that was over the preface Charlotte had written for the work. It was an answer to the unsigned notice of Jane Eyre by Elizabeth Rigby in the Quarterly Review of December 1848. When it appeared, Charlotte was still numb from the shock and grief of Emily’s sudden death: ‘the lash of the Quarterly, however severely applied, cannot sting’, she had then written.20 Over the succeeding months, however, Charlotte had brooded on the review and eventually decided to answer her critic, just as Anne had answered hers in her preface to the third edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne’s preface had been a dignified and reasonable, though passionately argued, defence of the realism of her scenes of debauchery and attack on the critics’ assumption that her sex made a difference to the correctness of her approach as a writer. Charlotte, in contrast, let fly in one of her most bitingly sarcastic moods, addressing her critic as if in a letter. Having first checked with Williams that the Quarterly’s reviewer was indeed a woman, Charlotte mocked her by echoing her own phrases on the sex of ‘Currer Bell’: ‘he feels assured – his heart tells him that the individual who did him the honour of a small notice in the “Quarterly” – if not a woman, properly so called – is that yet more venerable character – an Old Woman’.21 As Currer Bell, Charlotte then went on to treat Miss Rigby’s main points, dismissing most of them in a taunting yet flippant way strongly reminiscent of her juvenile writings as Charles Townshend and her ill-advised letter to Hartley Coleridge written all those years ago.
To the most hurtful criticism, that, if a woman, ‘Currer Bell’ must have long forfeited the society of her own sex ‘for some sufficient reason’, Charlotte responded:
You should see – Ma’am, the figure Currer Bell can cut at a small party: you should watch him assisting at a tea-table; you should behold him holding skeins of silk or Berlin wool for the young ladies about whom he innocuously philanders, and who, in return, knit him comforters for winter-wear, or work him slippers for his invalid-
Swinging from heavy-handed sarcasm to positive libel, Charlotte attacked ‘The idea by you propagated, if not by you conceived’ that ‘Currer Bell’ had been Thackeray’s governess. The inhabitants of Mayfair clearly had nothing better to do than to tell or hear some new thing: ‘Who invents the new things for their consumption?’ Charlotte demanded. ‘Who manufactures fictions to supply their cravings? I need not ask who vends them: you, Madam, are an active sales-woman; the pages of your “Quarterly” form a notable advertising medium.’ Charlotte ended her ‘letter’ with a long and flippant discourse on the accuracy of ‘Currer Bell’s’ descriptions of ladies’ dresses and fabrics and closed with a vitriolic flourish.
What a nice, pleasant gossip you and I have had together, Madam. How agreeable it is to twaddle at
I am yours very devotedly
Currer Bell
As an afterthought she added a postscript in which the anger and hurt could not be hidden under a frivolous tone and were exposed, naked, for all to see.
N.B. I read all you said about governesses. My dear Madam – just turn out and be a governess yourself for a couple of years: the experiment would do you good: a little irksome toil – a little unpitied suffering – two years of uncheered solitude might perhaps teach you that to be callous, harsh and unsympathizing is not to be firm, superior and magnanimous.
Recognizing the abruptness of her change in tone, Charlotte added a final rejoinder: ‘It was a twinge of the gout which dictated that postscript.’22
There can be no doubt that Smith, Elder & Co. were right to reject this preface: it did not answer any of the criticisms made, its sarcastic flippancy could easily be mistaken for simple frivolity and, in publicly assuming the role of a crusty ‘old bachelor’, Charlotte was simply laying herself open to future criticisms as and when her true sex and identity became known. Both Williams and George Smith urged her to replace her ‘Word to the “Quarterly”’ with a biographical preface which would be a far more effective answer to the critic once the tragedies of the last year were revealed. Charlotte refused. ‘I cannot change my preface. I can shed no tears before the public, nor utter any groan in the public ear.’ Her life was irrelevant to her book, she declared, pointing out that it was not ‘C. Brontë’ who had been attacked by the Quarterly:, ‘it is “Currer Bell” who was insulted – he must reply’. Equally, she refused to offer a properly argued defence of her book, declaring to George Smith that she could not condescend to be serious with the Quarterly, ‘it is too silly for solemnity’. In the face of Charlotte’s intransigence, Smith, Elder & Co. were left with no option but to refuse to publish the preface. Charlotte was deeply annoyed and brusquely declined to replace it with another.23
By fair means or foul, however, Charlotte contrived to get her chance of ‘a little word’ to her critic on the subject of governesses in the pages of the novel itself. When Mrs Pryor attempts to dissuade Caroline Helstone from becoming a governess, she describes the misery of her own previous employment in that capacity with the Hardman family. Relaying Miss Hardman’s pronouncements on governesses, ‘a bore’ to the ladies and ‘a tabooed woman’ to the gentlemen, ‘to whom they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex’, and yet who ‘annoyed them by frequently crossing their path’, a woman who ‘must ever be kept in a sort of isolation’ in order to maintain ‘that distance which the reserve of English manners and the decorum of English families exact’, Mrs Pryor was actually quoting verbatim from the Quarterly Review.24 By putting these remarks into this context, Charlotte invited her readers to condemn them, though few, if any, can have recognized their source. The rejection of her more overt attack on Elizabeth Rigby was a keen disappointment, particularly as Charlotte was gradually coming to realize the insidious effect of the review on potential readers. She herself had kept it from her father, as she knew it would have worried him, but she learnt that Miss Heald, sister of the vicar of Birstall, relying solely on the authority of the Quarterly had declared Jane Eyre to be ‘a wicked book’ – ‘an expression which – coming from her – I will here confess – struck somewhat deep’.25
With the publication of her second book, the question of her sex and her identity, which had been so virulently attacked in the Quarterly, came up for renewed discussion. Smith, Elder & Co.
, anxious on her behalf to deflect further speculation and unnecessary comment in the reviews – and probably also with an eye to the sensation that the unmasking of‘Currer Bell’ would cause – suggested that she should abandon her pseudonym. Now that her sisters were dead, her obligation to preserve their secret had come to an end and there was no real need for her to maintain the pretence. It was tempting to reveal her true identity so that she could meet famous authors and take her place in a society made accessible by her literary success. But she had learnt the benefits of anonymity and was now reluctant to lose it. The most obvious one was also the most practical. ‘I think if a good fairy were to offer me the choice of a gift, I would say – grant me the power to walk invisible’, Charlotte told George Smith, ‘though certainly I would add – accompany it by the grace never to abuse the privilege.’26 In Jane Eyre Charlotte had been able to get away with her portraits from the life, even in the case of William Carus Wilson and the Clergy Daughters’ School, because the events had happened long ago. In Shirley, however, though the story was set in the past, the characters were drawn on people who were not only still alive but also nearly all living in the small communities of Birstall and Gomersal, where everyone knew everyone else and most were related by marriage if not birth. It was inevitable that readers of the novel would recognize not only the setting of the novel in that area but also themselves and their neighbours.
Charlotte seems to have been blissfully unaware of this, answering Williams’ query as to whether she thought she would escape identification in Yorkshire with a cheerful ‘I am so little known, that I think I shall.’ Blithely describing how she had managed her characters, she declared, ‘Besides the book is far less founded on the Real – than perhaps appears.’ Instancing Mr Helstone, Caroline’s uncle and rector of Briarfield, Charlotte explained:
If this character had an original, it was in the person of a clergyman who died some years since at the advanced age of eighty. I never saw him except once – at the consecration of a Church – when I was a child of ten years old. I was then struck with his appearance and stern, martial air. At a subsequent period I heard him talked about in the neighbourhood where he had resided – some mentioned him with enthusiasm – others with detestation – I listened to various anecdotes, balanced evidence against evidence and drew an inference.27
Remarkably, even though Charlotte had analysed and reproduced Hammond Roberson’s character so minutely, it seems never to have occurred to her that others would recognize his portrait. Similarly, in depicting the Reverend William Margetson Heald, vicar of Birstall, as Mr Hall, rector of Nunnely, Charlotte underestimated the accuracy of her own portrayal and the perspicacity of her subject: ‘he knows me slightly,’ she conceded, ‘but he would as soon think I had closely observed him or taken him for a character – he would as soon, indeed, suspect me of writing a book – a novel – as he would his dog – Prince’.28
Just how wrong she was in her assumptions Charlotte was soon to discover. Rumours were clearly rife. In London, Smith, Elder & Co. were actively fielding enquiries about her identity: the name ‘Charlotte Brontë’ had obviously been whispered about, possibly by Thomas Cautley Newby, her sisters’ publisher, though as yet it meant nothing to the curious. In Keighley, where the ‘gossiping inquisitiveness of small towns is rife’, her envelopes of proofs were, Charlotte suspected, being opened and examined by those curious to find out why she received so many letters and packages from London.29 The real damage came from Birstall and Gomersal, however, and that even before Shirley had come into the district.
On 24 October, two days before the novel was due to be published, Charlotte went to Birstall to stay with Ellen Nussey, calling in at the dentist in Leeds on the way.30 Ellen had at last been formally admitted to the secret of the Brontës’ authorship, Charlotte having presented her with a copy of Wuthering Heights during her visit to Haworth after Emily’s death. Mary Taylor had known for even longer, but it was her brother Joe, whose suspicions had prompted him to visit the previous summer, who finally made Charlotte’s secret an open one. Evidently believing him to be more trustworthy than he proved, and fearing that the realism of her portraits of the Taylor family as the Yorkes in Shirley might offend, Charlotte had sent him copies of those chapters in which they featured. With remarkable equanimity for someone who had just discovered his sister’s friend to be the notorious ‘Currer Bell’ and himself and his family to have been ‘daguerreo-typed’ as characters in her next novel, Joe Taylor simply remarked that ‘she had not drawn them strong enough’.31
The day after her return home, Charlotte wrote to Williams in considerable chagrin.
During my late/ visit I have too often had reason – sometimes in a pleasant – sometimes in a painful form
The implicit disapproval in the attitude of some of her Birstall acquaintances who suspected her of being ‘Currer Bell’ was soon to be replaced by the more overt criticism of the reviewers. Shirley, a novel in three volumes by Currer Bell, was published on 26 October 1849. The first review appeared five days later in the Daily News. ‘Let me speak the truth – when I read it my heart sickened over it… On the whole I am glad a decidedly bad notice has come first – a notice whose inexpressible ignorance first stuns and then stirs me.’ The reviewer had declared the opening chapter ‘vulgar … unnecessary … disgusting’, and, ironically, given the reaction in Birstall and Gomersal, ‘Not one of its men are genuine. There are no such men. There are no Mr Helstones, Mr Yorkes, or Mr Moores. They are all as unreal as Madame Tussaud’s waxworks.’ ‘Are there no such men as the Helstones and Yorkes?’ Charlotte demanded furiously of Williams. ‘Yes there are
Is the first chapter disgusting or vulgar?
It is not: it is real.’
‘As for the praise of such a critic –’, she added, ‘I find it silly and nauseous – and I scorn it.’ The praise, which so stuck in Charlotte’s throat, was particularly obnoxious to her because it all centred on the fact that the reviewer had divined that ‘Shirley is the anatomy of the female heart’ and that ‘Currer Bell is petticoated’.33
In some respects, the review in the Daily News set the tone for the rest. The critics were, without exception, unanimous in deciding that Shirley proved ‘Currer Bell’ was a woman: ‘There is woman stamped on every page’, declared the Atlas, and the Critic, more acutely, pointed out that ‘The female heart is here anatomized with a minuteness of knowledge of its most delicate fibres, which could only be obtained by one who had her own heart under inspection. The emotions so wondrously described were never imagined: they must have been felt.’ The reviewer in Fraser’s Magazine was even prepared to bet ‘a trifle’ that ‘Currer Bell’ was not only a woman – ‘She knows women by their brains and hearts, men by their foreheads and chests’! – but a Yorkshire woman and one who had been a governess.34
On the whole, however, and with one notable exception, the fact that Charlotte’s sex had been ‘outed’ did not influence the tone of the reviews in the way that she had feared. The criticisms were virtually uniform and mostly just, though put with varying degrees of force and perspicacity. Though Charlotte would often reject such criticisms out of hand when she considered the reviewer to be ‘to the last degree incompetent, ignorant, and flippant’, as in the Daily News, she would accept quite meekly the same points made more thoughtfully and intelligently. The notice in The Examiner was typical in its criticisms, though untypical in the fact that Charlotte recognized its author as Albany Fonblanque, a man whose pow
er and discernment she admired: ‘I bend to his censorship, I am grateful for his praise; his blame deserves consideration; when he approves, I permit myself a moderate emotion of pride’.35
Fonblanque was equal in his praise and blame, though meting out both with greater enthusiasm than most of his contemporaries. He acknowledged that Shirley evinced the same ‘peculiar power’ as Jane Eyre, but felt that the story, the characters and the theme all bore too strong a resemblance to the earlier work.
While we thus freely indicate the defects of Shirley, let us at the same time express, what we very strongly feel, that the freshness and lively interest which the author has contrived to impart to a repetition of the same sort of figures, grouped in nearly the same social relations, as in her former work, is really wonderful. It is the proof of genius.
The book possessed deep interest, an irresistible grasp of reality, a marvellous vividness and distinction of conception and an intense power of graphic delineation and expression. ‘There are scenes which for strength and delicacy of emotion are not transcended in the range of English fiction’, he declared, but the faults were manifold. ‘Story there is none in Shirley.’ ‘The expression of motive by means of dialogue is … indulged to such minute and tedious extremes, that what ought to be developments of character in the speaker become mere exercitations of will and intellect in the author.’ The characters are ‘created by intellect, and are creatures of intellect. Habits, actions, conduct are attributed to them, such as we really witness in human beings; but the reflections and language which accompany these actions, are those of intelligence fully developed, and entirely self-conscious … in real men and women such clear knowledge of self is rarely developed at all’; ‘even in the children … we find the intellectual predominant and supreme. The young Yorkes, ranging from twelve years down to six, talk like Scotch professors of metaphysics.’ The old criticism of Jane Eyre reared its ugly head again: there was ‘an excess of the repulsive qualities not seldom rather coarsely indulged … She has a manifest pleasure in dwelling … on the purely repulsive in human character.’
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