Fonblanque had also one or two telling criticisms to make which were unique to his review but revealed his perspicacity in reading the character of his author from her work.
There is a hankering, not to be suppressed, after the fleshpots of Egypt – a strong sympathy with Toryism and High Church. The writer sees clearly that they are things of the past, but cannot help regretting them. The tone assumed to the dissenters and the manufacturers is hardly fair. Their high qualities are not denied, but there is a disposition to deepen the shadows in delineating them. There is cordiality when the foibles of rectors and squires are laughed at, but when the defects of the commercial class are touched there is bitterness.36
In pointing out her snobbery, Fonblanque had recognized one of the most unattractive of Charlotte’s traits and one that contributed most to her discontent and unhappiness both at Haworth, where Dissenters and manufacturers were in the majority, and as a governess, where an English gentleman like Mr Sidgwick had been excused the same sins for which the exciseman’s daughter, Mrs White, was lambasted.
The only constantly reiterated complaint which Fonblanque did not make was the lack of focus in Shirley. Unlike Jane Eyre, which had been written in the first person and thus had a single point of view, Shirley was written in the third person and had a multiplicity of characters, many of whom, as other critics were swift to point out, did nothing to advance or enhance the story. More importantly, there was a significant shift in the book’s interest from Caroline Helstone to Shirley Keeldar, who was only introduced at the end of the first volume.37 What the critics could not know, but Charlotte later divulged to Mrs Gaskell, was that Shirley was a tribute to her sister’s memory, a portrayal of Emily as she might have been had she been placed in health and prosperity. It was, inevitably, a romanticized portrait. The externals were all there – her studiousness, her lack of ceremony, her habit of sitting on the floor, her devotion to her huge dog Tartar, even the incident where she had been bitten by a suspected mad dog and secretly cauterized the wound herself – but the heart was missing.
Even Ellen Nussey did not recognize the supposed original of Shirley, despite her familiarity with Emily’s outward traits.38 As Emily herself failed in health and was snatched so suddenly from life, the importance of her fictional counterpart grew in Charlotte’s mind. By the time it came to naming the book, for Charlotte the interest had shifted from Caroline, Robert Moore and Hollows Mill to Shirley and Fieldhead, though most reviewers still seemed to think Caroline the heroine of the novel.
The general consensus of critical opinion was that Shirley was better written than Jane Eyre but lacked the earlier novel’s fire and originality: a worthy successor but not one that would further Currer Bell’s reputation. Charlotte aptly summed it up in her comment that those who were most charmed with Jane Eyre were the least pleased with Shirley, while those who had spoken disparagingly of Jane Eyre liked Shirley a little better than its predecessor.39
Even though some reviews, like that in The Times, were openly hostile and sarcastic in their treatment of Shirley, only one cut Charlotte to the quick. The reasons that it did so were twofold: first and foremost, it did the unforgivable in judging Shirley almost entirely on the sex of its author; second, it was written by George Henry Lewes, the only person outside Cornhill whom Charlotte had admitted to anything like a literary friendship and whose betrayal was therefore all the more hurtful. Throughout their correspondence in the months following the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte had maintained her pseudonym and sent her replies through Smith, Elder & Co. to avoid the postmarks which might betray her locality. Grateful for Lewes’ favourable review of her first novel, she had submitted to his rather bombastic lecturings in his private letters, but ably defended her corner against his insistence on realism and drawing from personal experience. On the publication of Shirley he had written to her again, expressing his dislike of the first chapter (which in his review he would describe as ‘offensive, uninstructive and unamusing’) and his conviction that Currer Bell was a woman. This prompted a sharp response from Charlotte.
I wish you did not think me a woman: I wish all reviewers believed ‘Currer Bell’ to be a man – they would be more just to him. 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 … Come what will – I cannot when I write think always of myself – and of what is elegant and charming in femininity – it is not on those terms or with such ideas I ever took pen in hand; and if it is only on such terms my writing will be tolerated – I shall pass away from the public and trouble it no more. Out of obscurity I came – to obscurity I can easily return.40
In the light of this letter, Lewes’ subsequent treatment of‘Currer Bell’ in the Edinburgh Review was little short of disgraceful. What was almost worse, throughout the review Lewes took every opportunity to gloat over the fact that he was privy to the secret of ‘Currer Bell’ and suggest that he was on intimate terms with her.
In fact, Lewes had just discovered Charlotte’s true identity. Either by persistent enquiry or by pure accident, he had met a former schoolfellow of hers who had recognized the Clergy Daughters’ School in ‘Lowood’ and Charlotte Brontë in ‘Currer Bell’. Williams had written at the beginning of November to warn her that the discovery had been made, though Charlotte was at a loss to identify his informant. It could not have been one of the Cowan Bridge girls, she insisted, because none of them could possibly have remembered her. ‘I cannot conceive that I left a trace behind me’, she told Williams. ‘My career was a very quiet one. I was plodding and industrious, perhaps I was very grave, for I suffered to see my sisters perishing, but I think I was remarkable for nothing.’41 As Charlotte suspected, it seems most likely that it was a Roe Head girl who recognized her, particularly as the discovery came within two weeks of the publication of Shirley, which would have confirmed any suspicions aroused by Jane Eyre.
Whoever his mysterious informant was, Lewes not only made use of his newly acquired knowledge, but positively boasted of it. He alluded unnecessarily to the Quarterly Review’s conclusion that the author of Jane Eyre was ‘a heathen educated among heathens’ merely so that he could add with a revelatory flourish, ‘– the fact being, that the authoress is the daughter of a clergyman!’ ‘She must learn also to sacrifice a little of her Yorkshire roughness to the demands of good taste:’, he pontificated, making it clear he knew where she lived, ‘neither saturating her writings with such rudeness and offensive harshness, nor suffering her style to wander into such vulgarities as would be inexcusable – even in a man.’ He revealed her spinsterhood in a particularly callous and cruel way, by criticizing the unnatural way in which Mrs Pryor had parted with her baby: ‘Currer Bell! if under your heart had ever stirred a child, if to your bosom a babe had ever been pressed … never could you have imagined such a falsehood as that!’ The peculiar nastiness of this remark can only be appreciated by realizing that Lewes had begun his review with the grandiloquent statement that ‘The grand function of woman … is, and ever must be, Maternity.’42 Currer Bell had failed not only as a writer but also as a woman.
‘I have received and perused the “Edinburgh Review”’, Charlotte wrote to Williams, adding, with quiet dignity,
– it is very brutal and savage. I am not angry with Lewes – but I wish in future he would let me alone – and not write again what makes me feel so cold and sick as I am feeling just now –43
To Lewes himself she sent the briefest of notes: ‘I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!’44 Too self-important to understand the hurt he had caused, Lewes wrote demanding an explanation, and received a longer but still dignified reply.
I will tell you why I was so hurt by that review … not because its criticism was keen or its blame sometimes severe; not because its praise was stinted (for indeed I think you give me quite as much praise as I deserve) but because, after I had said earne
stly that I wished critics would judge me as an author not as a woman, you so roughly – I even thought – so cruelly handled the question of sex …
With a magnanimity which Lewes surely did not deserve and which Charlotte would not have granted to a lesser personage, she told him that she bore him no malice.
I imagine you are both enthusiastic and implacable, as you are at once sagacious and careless. You know much and discover much, but you are in such a hurry to tell it all, you never give yourself time to think how your reckless eloquence may affect others, and, what is more, if you knew how it did affect them you would not much care.
Ending her letter with implicit reproof, she signed herself ‘yours with a certain respect and some chagrin Currer Bell’.45 If Lewes had thought his sagacity in uncovering her identity had earned him the right to a letter from Charlotte Brontë, he was sadly mistaken: Currer Bell had been insulted, Currer Bell would reply.
Lewes’ tactless and cruel behaviour was in sharp contrast to that of Mrs Gaskell. Like him, she had been consumed with curiosity to find out the identity of ‘Currer Bell’ and had asked her friend, Eliza Fox, to make enquiries of Dr Epps, whose contact with Charlotte had become public knowledge.46 By the middle of November Mrs Gaskell was privy to at least some information about Charlotte and, struck by the passages on watching at Caroline’s sickbed in Shirley, which had been sent to her with the author’s compliments, wrote privately to her through Smith, Elder & Co. to express her sympathy. ‘She said I was not to answer it’, Charlotte told Williams, ‘but I cannot help doing so. Her note brought the tears to my eyes: she is a good – she is a great woman – proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble.’47 Though Charlotte gave away little in her reply, writing impersonally as ‘Currer Bell’, she admitted Mrs Gaskell so far into her confidence as to own her sex – the first time she had done so in writing as ‘Currer Bell’.
Currer Bell must answer Mrs Gaskell’s letter – whether forbidden to do so or not – and She must acknowledge its kind, generous sympathy with all her heart.
Yet Mrs Gaskell must not pity Currer Bell too much: there are thousands who suffer more than she: dark days she has known; the worst, perhaps, were days of bereavement, but though CB is the survivor of most that were dear to her, she has one near relative still left, and therefore cannot be said to be quite alone.
Currer Bell will avow to Mrs Gaskell that her chief reason for maintaining an incognito is the fear that if she relinquished it, strength and courage would leave her, and she should ever after shrink – from writing the plain truth.48
Mrs Gaskell could not resist a triumphant note to Catherine Winkworth, ‘Currer Bell (aha! what will you give me for a secret?) She’s a she – that I will tell you – who has sent me Shirley’, but otherwise respected Charlotte’s confidence.49 She and Harriet Martineau were both recipients of Shirley, not simply because Charlotte admired them but also because she was morbidly inclined to see in them a resemblance to her dead sister. ‘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 –’.50
Charlotte’s postbag now regularly included letters from her admirers. These ranged from the great and good, like Mrs Gaskell, Harriet Martineau and, more surprisingly, Sir John Herschel, the famous astronomer, to the humble and eccentric. One ‘not quite an old maid – but nearly one – she says’, sent Charlotte an enthusiastic letter declaring that if ‘Currer Bell’ were a gentleman and like his heroes, she suspected she would fall in love with him. Half-laughing, half-crying, Charlotte retorted to Williams, ‘You and Mr Smith would not let me announce myself as a single gentleman of mature age in my preface – but if you had permitted it, a great many elderly spinsters would have been pleased.’51 Another letter was alarming not just in its excessive enthusiasm for Shirley but because the writer announced his ‘fixed, deliberate resolution to institute a search after “Currer Bell” and sooner or later to find him out’. ‘It almost makes me feel like a Wizard who has raised a spirit he may find it difficult to lay’, Charlotte confessed to Williams. ‘But I shall not think about it – This sort of fervor often foams itself away in words.’52
Charlotte’s anonymity and with it her ability to ‘walk invisible’ was gradually being whittled away. Lewes had started the process in London, Joe Taylor in Gomersal: the news would soon spread to the papers and it was simply a matter of time until the truth became public knowledge.
Aware of this, and that she had at least tried to live up to Emily’s insistence on anonymity even after her sister’s death had removed the necessity for it, Charlotte began to toy with the idea of going to London as the acknowledged author of Jane Eyre and Shirley. Williams had been pressing the idea upon her for over a year, but her brother and sisters’ illnesses and deaths had made it impossible; afterwards she had been reluctant to go out into society. Looking back over that period, Charlotte had admitted ‘there have been intervals when I have ceased to care about literature and critics and fame – when I have lost sight of whatever was prominent in my thoughts at the first publication of “Jane Eyre” – but now I want these things to come back – vividly –’. 53 Ambition was reborn.
‘I am trying by degrees to inure myself to the thought of some day/ stepping over to Keighley, taking the train to Leeds – thence to London – and once more venturing to set foot in the strange, busy whirl of the Strand and Cornhill’, she wrote to Williams on 15 November. ‘I want to talk to you a little and to hear by word of mouth how matters are progressing – Whenever I come – I must come quietly and but for a short time – I should be unhappy to leave Papa longer than a fortnight.’54 Charlotte could now consider leaving her father alone with the servants for two weeks, without even a second thought, when it suited her own plans.
Her original idea was to take up a long-standing invitation from the Wheelwrights, her Brussels friends, who now lived at 29, Phillimore Place in Kensington: that was until something better turned up. Hearing that she intended to come to London, George Smith himself wrote to her, suggesting that she should stay with him and making his mother write to second the offer. Charlotte leapt at the chance. Somewhat disingenuously telling Smith that at first she had thought she would have to decline because of her prior invitation, she then went on to declare:
these friends only know me as Miss Brontë, and they are of the class, perfectly worthy but in no sort remarkable – to whom I should feel it quite superfluous to introduce Currer Bell; I know they would not understand the author. Under these circumstances my movements would have been very much restrained, and in fact this consideration formed a difficulty in the way of my coming to London at all. I think however I might conscientiously spend part of the time with you and part with my other friends.55
She was even prepared to defer her visit to the Wheelwrights in order to come at a more convenient time for the Smiths. In the meantime, she sent for a dressmaker and had her prepare a whole new wardrobe of clothes, from dresses down to underclothes: this time, even though she was still obliged to wear mourning, she would not be caught going to the opera in her ‘plain – high-made, country garments’.56
Charlotte’s eagerness to stay with the Smiths in London was a manifestation of what Mary Taylor called her ‘notion of literary fame – a passport to the society of clever people’.57 It was also a sign of her growing friendship with George Smith. Although most of her correspondence with Smith, Elder & Co. had been with Williams, she had been favourably disposed towards its young head since she first met him during the ‘pop visit’ with Anne. Over the last few months, however, their friendship had burgeoned over the unlikely matter of Charlotte’s seeking George Smith’s advice on her investments. Writing to thank him for the £500 he had sent her on the completion of Shirley, she told him she felt both pleased and proud of the amount she had earned. ‘I should like to take care of this money:’ she informed him ea
rnestly, ‘it is Papa’s great wish that I should realize a small independency if you could give me a word of advice respecting the wisest and safest manner of investing this £500, I should be very much obliged to you.’ She could not, of course, apply to her ‘ordinary acquaintance’ for information, as this would naturally lead to speculation about the source of her new-found fortune. George Smith advised Charlotte to place her money in the Funds, where it would earn an unspectacular but safe dividend, and offered to make all the necessary arrangements on her behalf.58 He also, at her request, investigated the value of her shares in the York & North Midland Railway in the wake of the recent crash in prices. She was shocked to learn that her holding was now virtually worthless: ‘In fact’, she told him,
the little railway property I possessed, according to original prices – formed already a small competency for one with my views and habits, now – scarcely any portion of it can with security be calculated on. I must open this view of the case to my father by degrees, and meantime wait patiently until I see how affairs are likely to turn. Some of the local papers strenuously advise against selling just now; they affirm that the market is far more depressed than it otherwise would be, by the fact of shareholders hurrying to sell, in a panic.59
There was a kindness in George Smith’s attentions and a comfort in placing her financial affairs in his obviously capable hands for Charlotte, who was feeling increasingly isolated at Haworth. She knew she was assured of his protection in London and, judging by his reaction to her first visit, that she could rely on him to entertain her.
Retracing the steps of the ‘pop visit’, but this time alone, Charlotte travelled by train to London on Thursday, 29 November 1849, and was taken to the Smiths’ house in Westbourne Place, Paddington. Her publisher’s family had now been admitted into the secret of their guest’s true identity. ‘Mrs Smith received me at first like one who has had the strictest orders to be scrupulously attentive –’, Charlotte told Ellen,
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