Williams had to write back with the unenviable task of explaining once more to their new bestselling author that The Professor was not wanted, a judgement that puzzled Charlotte more and more, but that she had to accept. “It is my wish to do my best in the career on which I have entered,” she told her publisher, “so I shall study and strive, and by dint of time, thought and effort, I hope yet to deserve in part the encouragement you and others have so generously accorded me. But Time will be necessary: that I feel more than ever.”
A pencilled draft of her brief letter to Williams about The Professor has survived because on the reverse of the paper is the draft of a poem, never published in Charlotte’s lifetime, which shows what revisiting her Brussels novel had stirred up in her mind. It begins thus:
He saw my heart’s woe discovered my soul’s anguish
How in fever—in thirst, in atrophy it pined
Knew he could heal yet looked and let it languish
To its moans spirit-deaf, to its pangs spirit-blind
But once a year he heard a whisper low and dreary
Appealing for aid, entreating some reply
Only when sick soul-worn, and torture weary
Breathed I that prayer—heaved I that sigh
He was mute as is the grave—he stood stirless as a tower
At last I looked up and saw I prayed to stone
I asked help of that which to help had no power
I sought love where love was utterly unknown
By December 1847, this is where her thoughts of Heger had led her: to the image of him “stirless as a tower,” impenetrable, distant, cruelly unresponsive. Charlotte packed up copies of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey to send to Mary Taylor in Wellington; did she also send a copy to the rue d’Isabelle? It seems unlikely. Jane Eyre should have been the proof, spectacular and irrefutable, that she was worthy of her Master’s continued attention, his love, esteem and recognition; instead the moment of its publication parted them even further. Charlotte had finally realised the futility of her suffering, though she stopped short of admitting that the love of an idol was idolatrous. A merciful God could not possibly condemn such a love, she felt:
He gave our hearts to love, he will not love despise
E’en if the gift be lost as mine was long ago
He will forgive the fault—will bid the offender rise
Wash out with dews of bliss the fiery brand of woe.
By the time Agnes Grey was published, Anne Brontë was well ahead with her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the story of an abused wife seeking refuge from her marriage, whose situation and attempts to earn her own living as an artist excite suspicion and scorn among her new neighbours. Just as Charlotte had learnt from Wuthering Heights to add passion and excitement to the plot of Jane Eyre, so Anne noted the pace and skilful handling of both her sisters’ books, and brought those qualities to bear on her own, which has the feel of a mystery and thriller as much as of a morality tale. But the book obsessed the author in ways that worried her eldest sister, who saw Anne continually stooped over her work, writing for too many hours of each day. “[It] is with difficulty one can prevail on her to take a walk or induce her to converse,” Charlotte told Ellen. It was only later, when she understood that the new novel depicted with painful verisimilitude the stages of a long ruination through vice and drink, that Charlotte understood Anne’s grim determination over its composition. Much that was criticised (not least by Charlotte) as coarse and unpleasant in the book was an unvarnished account of some aspects of life at Haworth Parsonage in 1847–8: the daily ordeal of having to tolerate the violence and degraded behaviour of a drunkard. “The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid,” Charlotte wrote later in explanation of her sister’s subject. “She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm.” But in many ways Anne Brontë showed considerable bravery in exposing the realities around her—not least because of the resistance from her older sister. Perhaps the only way she could cope with Branwell’s dissolution was to hold it up to others as a warning.
Emily was planning, and possibly writing, a second novel at the beginning of 1848, as one can deduce from a remark in a letter to her from Newby that he would have “great pleasure in making arrangements” for it, and advised, “I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it.” She composed very little poetry at this time: the reception of Poems had not encouraged her at all. Charlotte was also thinking about what to write next, intimidating though it was to bear in mind, as Newby had told Emily, that “much depends on your next work if it be an improvement on your first you will have established yourself as a first rate novelist, but if it fall short the Critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent.” Forced to shelve The Professor, Charlotte turned to something quite different from both it and Jane Eyre, armed with her new knowledge of what real audiences, rather than her imagined audience, might like or demand. The new novel, called “Hollows Mill” at this early stage, and later called Shirley, was going to reflect life and society in her own corner of the world, the West Riding, a “condition of England” novel that would also attempt a light, satirical tone, possibly in emulation of Thackeray, whose work she admired even more now that she knew he admired hers.
The authorial voice she adopted for the purpose seemed nervously aware of the pressure on her to satisfy an audience of eager Jane Eyre fans; on the first page she warned that this was to be a story as “unromantic as Monday morning”—something “real, cool, and solid,” with very little “taste of the exciting.” Brontë baulked, though, at a realistic contemporary setting, placing the action thirty years earlier, in the 1810s.
That she originally considered setting her new novel in the 1840s, and against the background of Chartism, was suggested by a local Chartist sympathiser called Francis Butterfield, who in old age published an account of how Charlotte Brontë had visited him one afternoon (in the spring or summer of 1848) to consult “with respect to a proposed story on the Chartists’ agitations.” Miss Brontë had walked over from Haworth to Butterfield’s home in Wilsden, he said, accompanied by her dog Floss, and by the end of tea had been dissuaded from her plan, “which at that time would only have added a flame to the still smouldering embers of discontent,” as a chronicler of old Bingley retold the story. Though the meeting is not corroborated elsewhere, and seems socially strange (for example, in that Charlotte was unaccompanied, unless you count the spaniel), there are reasons to believe it. It shows the same concern with research and getting her facts right that Charlotte demonstrated later, when she had changed her subject from the Chartists to the Luddites and borrowed files from the archives of The Leeds Mercury to read contemporary accounts of the events of 1811–12. And she or one or both of her sisters were also admirers of another Chartist sympathiser, the Leeds poet Ebenezer Elliott, to whom they had sent a copy of the Bells’ Poems in 1847.*6
Her decision to avoid Chartism and the present day came from a rapid toning down of her enthusiasm for the revolutionary dramas being played out in Italy, Hungary, France and Germany in the spring and summer of 1848. Her feelings at the beginning of the year were empathetic and engaged, partly because some of the figures connected with unfolding events in France were ones she knew of from her discussions of politics and literature with Constantin Heger. Charlotte had written a well-informed and discursive letter to Williams (man to man, as it were, as “Currer Bell”) about the promotion to government of men like Lamartine and Thiers, wondering what it would be like in Britain under similar circumstances, if Carlyle, Sir John Herschel, Tennyson and Thackeray were suddenly made into national legislators: “do such men sway the public mind most effect
ually from their quiet studies or from a council-chamber?” This was in the same month—February—in which she had written her preface to the second edition of her genuinely inflammatory novel, Jane Eyre, with its praise of Thackeray as a leader who could “restore to rectitude the warped system of things.” At this point Currer Bell could have been easily mistaken for a revolutionary sympathiser. Perhaps at heart she was. By March, she regretted that the wording of her preface had been so warm, given the proclamation of a republican government in France that was sparking Chartist celebrations in London and elsewhere. Her remarks about Thackeray as leading “social regenerator” now seemed particularly impertinent. “I wish I had written it in a cool moment,” she told Williams; “I should have said the same things, but in a different manner.”
Though she sympathised with German states wanting constitutional reform in the wake of the French revolution—referring to “their rational and justifiable efforts for liberty”—Charlotte’s natural conservatism reasserted itself as soon as the contagion of revolt threatened her own shores. “[E]arthquakes roll lower than the ocean, and we know neither the day nor the hour when the tremor and heat, passing beneath our island, may unsettle and dissolve its foundations,” she told Williams. There had been a mass meeting of Chartists in Leeds on 10 March, and, though the group was keen to appear non-violent, and focused on the presentation of their “monster petition” of more than a million signatories to Parliament (planned for the following month), many of the men at the Lees Moor muster were armed, some crudely with sharpened staves, and the flag they hoisted was that of the French republic. Charlotte used the earthquake image again in a letter of 31 March to Margaret Wooler:
I have still no doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life both in Nations and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale diverts men’s minds momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and, for the time, gives them something like largeness of views; but—as little doubt have I that convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface, in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust by their violence the vital energies of the countries where they occur. That England may be spared the spasms, cramps and frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray!
The transposition of her story back in time forty years was a way of writing about 1848 at one remove, identifying some of the early symptoms of the “disease,” but it created obvious difficulties. Charlotte had planned her story around local characters drawn from the life, but it was the life of the 1830s and 1840s, not the period just before her own birth. Emily Brontë was to be the model for Shirley herself, the Taylor family for the radical Yorkes, Hammond Roberson for Matthewson Helstone, Ellen may have contributed something to his niece Caroline, Miss Wooler to Mrs. Pryor, Mademoiselle Haussé of the Pensionnat Heger to Hortense Gérard Moore, and Monsieur Heger was plundered for aspects of both the Belgian brothers, Robert and Louis Moore. This gave a strange anachronism to the novel’s manners, though Charlotte managed (through careful research) to reconstruct the social moment skilfully.
Casting the issues of 1848 back on to this screen, Charlotte made some interesting observations about the impenetrability of class boundaries, which Will Farren, one of the mill-workers whose jobs are lost to Robert Moore’s new machinery, complains cannot be crossed: “I believe that ‘the people’ will never have any true friends but theirsel’n, and them two or three good folk i’ different stations, that is friends to all the world. Human natur’, taking it i’ th’ lump, is naught but selfishness.” The comparable predicaments of workers and women are linked all through the novel in a very interesting meld of the personal with the political. In the same passage where she thinks about the unattractiveness of neediness, Caroline comes to some stark conclusions: “old maids, like the houseless and the unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents.” But this underemployment of women makes them narrow-minded and fixated on capturing a husband, Caroline realises, and, since so many of them will never marry (it is an “overstocked market,” she says, using an appropriately commercial term), their futile coquetry only earns more male scorn, lowering the stock even further.
For all the explicit political argument in the book, Shirley is directed inwards more than outwards, and the most striking passages are to do with the private and for the most part silent interior battles of an apparently subsidiary character, Caroline. Her quietness is a marked recession from Jane Eyre’s urge to speak; nor is it used strategically like Frances Henri, but makes a study in impotence. When Robert Moore, the brusque, domineering, sexy, half-Belgian owner of Hollow’s Mill, withdraws the light of his favour from the young woman whose love he has carelessly engaged, Caroline realises that she cannot even seek an explanation for his behaviour without incurring shame, for “a lover feminine can say nothing.” “Take the matter as you find it,” the narrator steps in bitterly to remark:
ask no questions; utter no remonstrances: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrized…You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.
The violence of expression here is striking. Charlotte knew that this book would be published—and it was the first time she had been in such a position. This wasn’t, like The Professor or Jane Eyre, a shot in the dark. But instead of tempering her voice (as she claims to be about to do in the first chapter), she used this public space very personally and very vehemently.
The novel is full of such interjections, all extremely disorienting, as one supposes they were intended to be. The narrator addresses the reader, apologises, directs attention to the fictional nature of the story, glosses, jokes, but remains in an undeclared relation to the action she can’t resist interrupting. One such moment, part-way through the first scene at Briarmains (the house based on the Taylors’ Red House), takes a morbid detour into a vision of the family’s future, rather like a dark version of Emily’s and Anne’s Diary Papers: Jessy Yorke will die young and be buried in a foreign grave, we are cruelly informed; her sister Rose will be a lonely emigrant “in some region of the southern hemisphere.” One minute, we are being told about Shirley’s plans to help the poor of the parish, and informed that her smile is not like the usual female downcast look, a veiled look, in other words. Then comes this most arbitrary and violent digression:
I remember once seeing a pair of blue eyes, that were usually thought sleepy, secretly on the alert, and I knew by their expression—an expression which chilled my blood…that for years they had been accustomed to silent soul-reading. The world called the owner of these blue eyes “bonne petite femme” (she was not an Englishwoman): I learned her nature afterwards—got it off by heart—studied it in its farthest, most hidden recesses—she was the finest, deepest, subtlest schemer in Europe.
What is this viciously exaggerated attack on Madame Heger doing here? The narrator recovers the thread of the story immediately afterwards, but there it sits, unwarranted on any grounds, artistic or personal. Another bog burst from Charlotte’s seething substratum.
—
WHEN Jane Eyre went into its third edition, in April, Charlotte provided yet another preface, short and to the point this time, stating that it was Currer Bell’s sole work, and that “If…the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited.” This was an attempt to quell the increasingly annoying speculation that Jane Eyre, Wu
thering Heights and Agnes Grey were all by the same author (quite an author!) “insanely bent on severing himself into three,” as Currer joked with Williams. Her correspondent kept her abreast of some of the follies committed in her name in “your great world—your London,” the worst of which was a dramatisation of her novel (done without any need to seek permission at that date) only two months after the book was published, in January 1848. Charlotte had been intrigued to hear of such a production, and even considered going down to the capital to sneak in and watch it incognito. That being impossible, she encouraged Williams to go on her behalf, but his subsequent description of the play was a horrible shock, “a glimpse of what I might call loathsome, but which I prefer calling strange,” with the introduction of some low-comedy characters, an extra mad person and a lot of physical violence. If such a spectacle was the result of fame, Emily must have seemed right to shun it.
Meanwhile, as if he sensed that he was being put into “Hollow’s Mill,” Joe Taylor had turned up uninvited at the Parsonage one day in June with his cousin William Henry (whom Charlotte knew well from Brussels) and another cousin. Charlotte was suspicious of their motives for this “capricious” visit (no Brontë liked or encouraged informal socialising), guessing it was “prompted…by curiosity” and that Joe had indeed deduced the identity of “Currer Bell.” Charlotte fended off the Taylors, as she did Ellen, who was in London that summer and aware of “quite a fureur” about the Bells and the authorship of Jane Eyre. Ellen acquired the book, it seems, purely to test the theory of whether or not it had been written by her friend, and claimed many years later that, while reading it, it “was as though Charlotte Brontë herself was present in every word, her voice and spirit thrilling through and through.” Charlotte had been correcting proof sheets when she was at Brookroyd the previous autumn, without explaining what she was doing, so Ellen didn’t have much trouble putting two and two together. But when she wrote to Charlotte, coyly asking her opinion of the new bestseller, she got a sardonic answer: “we do not subscribe to a circulating library at Haworth and consequently ‘new novels’ rarely indeed come in our way, and consequently again we are not qualified to give opinions thereon.” That should have confirmed it pretty much beyond doubt.
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