Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

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  THE AUTUMN CAME and Villette was still unfinished. Aware of Smith’s expectations to publish a new work by Currer Bell as soon as possible (it was three years since the appearance of Shirley), she sent him the first two volumes on their own, longing to know what he thought—“not that I am likely to alter anything,” she cautioned. Smith must have been consternated to find that the new novel returned so doggedly to the material of The Professor, and was a book of such sombreness and negativity. He had queries about the flow of the narrative and the consistency of the characterisation (as well he might have—both are extremely confusing) and can’t have failed to recognise, and been perturbed by, the portraits of himself and his mother contained in Charlotte’s characterisation of Dr. John Graham Bretton and Mrs. Bretton, and the inclusion of scenes (such as the fire in the theatre) lifted whole from his own experience. His curiosity about how the plot was going to end, therefore, had a very personal slant. Was his bestselling author about to publish a love story in which they were married off to each other at the end? Charlotte’s précis of the third volume was a form of covert reassurance:

  Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited and sweet-tempered; he is a “curled darling” of Nature and of Fortune; he must draw a prize in Life’s Lottery; his wife must be young, rich and pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody—it must be the Professor—a man in whom there is much to forgive—much to “put up with.” But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost*2 —from the beginning I never intended to appoint her lines in pleasant places.

  Smith would also have been troubled by Charlotte’s hope that the new novel might be published anonymously, in an attempt to claw back the freedom she had felt when writing Jane Eyre. “If the witholding of the author’s name should tend materially to injure the publisher’s interest—to interfere with booksellers’ orders &c. I would not press the point; but if no such detriment is contingent—I should be most thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito,” she wrote to him when she sent the first two volumes. “I seem to dread the advertisements—the large lettered ‘Currer Bell’s New Novel’ or ‘New Work by the Author of “Jane Eyre.” ’ These, however, I feel well enough are the transcendentalisms of a retired wretch.” This is the most explicit evidence of how Charlotte’s fame had begun to oppress her, and of how much the tragic story of Emily’s and Anne’s short lives and early deaths, as revealed in her 1850 edition of their novels, had worked on public opinion. She did not wish to be “consumed” by a public hungry for celebrities. But the name of “Currer Bell” was too valuable for Smith to put by, and, unsurprisingly, he insisted on using it.

  Had the hope that she would be allowed to “walk invisible” again in Villette affected the way Charlotte wrote the book? It is certainly the most explicitly personal of all her works, laying out scenes and characters in direct imitation of real ones, which would be instantly recognisable to anyone of her acquaintance. Her trips to the theatre, to the Conservatoire concert, to the Salon Exhibition, the fête in the park, and of course the whole layout and organisation of the Pensionnat are put into the novel unedited and unabridged, with the flavour of meticulously recalled memories. The degree of artificiality in the novel would be truly evident only to the novelist—her friends would of course mostly see a peculiarly thorough form of self-exposure. Thackeray read it as straight autobiography, writing to his young friend Lucy Baxter,

  it amuses me to read the author’s naïve confession of being in love with 2 men at the same time; and her readiness to fall in love at any time. The poor little woman of genius! the fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny worth of good looks, thirty years old I should think buried in the country, and eating up her own heart there, and no Tomkins will come.

  Unknown to him, of course, Charlotte Brontë had her very own Tomkins resident in Haworth—but whether she craved him as Thackeray imagined was another matter.

  Charlotte sent off the last volume of Villette to Cornhill on 20 November 1852, but then had to endure a long silence from Smith. Did he hate the ending—did he hate the whole book? On 1 December she could bear the wait no longer and wrote directly to ask him, only to have several more days’ anxiety before his reply finally arrived. He had more cavils about the focus of the story, complaining about the “transfer of interest” from one group of characters to another at the end (and the introduction of the new romance with Monsieur Paul). Again Charlotte said she agreed with him, but did nothing to change her manuscript. Her only significant adjustment at this stage was to switch the heroine’s surname.

  The most tangible sign of Smith’s disappointment in the novel was his offer of only £500 for the copyright, when Charlotte, and her father, had expected an increase on that sum, the same as for Jane Eyre and Shirley. But Smith clearly did not expect a runaway success, either in terms of sales or of reviews. Currer Bell’s public all longed for a reprise of the Jane Eyre thrill, and Villette, for all its power, was unable to supply that.

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  RELEASED FROM THE LABOUR of finishing her book, Charlotte allowed herself to think of another trip to London of a few weeks, to coincide with the correction of proofs and to see the book through to publication. Not knowing she was about to be depicted in Charlotte’s new novel, Mrs. Smith had held open an invitation and a date was set for the new year. Charlotte prepared by buying new bonnets and dress materials in Leeds and having the errant 1850 hairpiece “rearranged”—“it is now a very different matter to the bushy, tasteless thing it was before.” But before the trip could go ahead, and two weeks before Christmas 1852, Charlotte was completely taken by surprise and the household thrown into turmoil by a drama unfolding rapidly at the Parsonage. She wrote to Ellen about it two days later, wondering if her friend had had any intimation that Arthur Bell Nicholls was in love with her, since she, not being able to see clearly, she said, had not understood the significance of his gestures and looks, beyond “dim misgivings.” Papa, for all his physical blindness, seems to have picked up much more of what had been passing (as he had with James Taylor) and had noticed “with little sympathy and much indirect sarcasm” the curate’s recent low spirits and threats to leave Haworth.

  On the evening of 13 December, the three of them had been taking tea in Reverend Brontë’s study and Charlotte “vaguely felt…the meaning of [Nicholls’s] constant looks—and strange, feverish restraint.” As usual, she left the two men alone after a while and retired to the dining room. Between eight and nine o’clock, she heard the study door open and expected it to be followed by the sound of the front door shutting, but instead there was a hesitation, the sound of a silent curate hovering in the hall, and then a gentle tap at the dining-room door.

  like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He entered. He stood before me. What his words were—you can guess; his manner—you can hardly realize—nor can I forget it—Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty—he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection when he doubts response…He spoke of sufferings he had borne for months—of sufferings he could endure no longer—and craved leave for some hope.

  Nicholls was not just in love, but painfully so, and the spectacle of “one ordinarily so statue-like—thus trembling, stirred, and overcome” was astonishing to Charlotte, who had no idea that he was capable of such passion. Her sympathy flared up at the thought of how he must have suffered in silence for so long; and it was as a fellow victim of a one-sided passion, rather than as someone in love with her, that her heart went out to him. But of course she did not encourage this sudden suit. Whatever her feelings for him at this point (and they wer
e not ardent), the interview gave her “a strange shock”: “I could only entreat him to leave me then and promise a reply on the morrow. I asked if he had spoken to Papa. He said—he dared not—I think I half-led, half put him out of the room.”

  Nicholls’s fear of speaking to Mr. Brontë on this topic was fully justified, as Charlotte discovered when she went into the study as soon as Nicholls left and reported what had taken place:

  Agitation and Anger disproportionate to the occasion ensued—if I had loved Mr. N— and had heard such epithets applied to him as were used—it would have transported me past my patience—as it was—my blood boiled with a sense of injustice—but Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with—the veins on his temples started up like whip-cord—and his eyes became suddenly blood-shot—I made haste to promise that Mr. Nicholls should on the morrow have a distinct refusal.

  The symptoms of imminent apoplexy put an end to any debate. Charlotte had been told by the doctor just a few months earlier that her father’s blood pressure was so high that any “rush to the brain” would “almost be to kill him at once.” But in her careful noting of Papa’s symptoms, one senses Charlotte’s shifting sympathies, away from his incontinent display of selfishness and towards her own feelings and judgements, which she had never abandoned of course, but which were so habitually subordinated to those of her parent.

  There followed a period of dreadful turmoil in the Parsonage, with Patrick Brontë fuming and furious on one side, Nicholls distraught and desperate on the other, and Charlotte stuck in the middle. As soon as he understood the strength of the vicar’s disapproval, Nicholls resigned and promised to leave Haworth by the following May, but the amount of “turbulence of feeling” produced in the interim consternated Charlotte, since it had so little to do with her. Meanwhile she was forced to listen to her father’s constant outbursts of indignation against the curate: “He just treats him with a hardness not to be bent—and a contempt not to be propitiated.”

  When the cause of the trouble was known around the Parsonage, Charlotte was sorry to find that she was the only person to pity Mr. Nicholls. Martha was “bitter against him” (probably thinking no one was good enough for Miss Brontë), while Martha’s father, John Brown the sexton, said he wanted to shoot him—uncomfortable for Nicholls, as Brown was his landlord. “They don’t understand the nature of his feelings,” Charlotte explained to Ellen, indicating the way her own were changing subtly as people around her ganged up. “Mr. N is one of those who attach themselves to very few, whose sensations are close and deep—like an underground stream, running strong but in a narrow channel.”

  Early in the new year Nicholls made an inquiry to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, offering his services abroad as a missionary. Any idea that this was a touch of melodrama on Nicholls’s part is scotched by the degree of commitment such an application required, with a full account from the candidate of his qualifications and intentions and four testimonials witnessing to his character and achievements. One of these, unfortunately, had to be elicited from the man he had just incensed, who wrote a fair but tight-lipped letter, clearly intended to speed the removal of the offender to some remote part of the globe: “He is very discreet, is under no pecuniary embarrassment, that I am aware of, nor is he, I think, likely to be so, since, in all pecuniary and other matters, as far as I have been able to discover, he is wary, and prudent.” The qualifications here seem as prominent as the statements.

  Nicholls did rather better from his other referees, who all praised his exceptional zeal and ability, especially in the management of the school, and the vicar of Bradford added that Nicholls had worked wonders in a parish so full of “a rude, and dissenting population” that his work “has nearly approached that of a missionary” already.

  Charlotte felt her father was glad for once to pack her off to London at the end of January, and the Smiths thought her more animated than usual, without knowing why. She asserted herself more too, asking not to go much into society or on pleasure trips to the theatre et cetera, but to be taken to places illustrating “rather the real than the decorative side of Life”—Newgate and Pentonville prisons, the Bank of England, the Bethlehem Hospital (the asylum for the insane known as Bedlam), the Stock Exchange and the Foundling Hospital. “Mrs. S[mith] and her daughters are—I believe—a little amazed at my gloomy tastes, but I take no notice.” Having decided that she could not write on “matters of public interest” without giving them proper study, and with Villette behind her, perhaps Charlotte was thinking of future material—if so, it seems as if it might have strayed over into Dickens’s territory. At Newgate (a site that Dickens had used in Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist and, most recently, Barnaby Rudge), George Smith recalled Miss Brontë quickly fixing her attention on an individual prisoner: “There was a poor girl with an interesting face, and an expression of the deepest misery. She had, I believe, killed her illegitimate child. Miss Brontë walked up to her, took her hand, and began to talk to her. She was, of course, quickly interrupted by the prison warder with the formula ‘Visitors are not allowed to speak to the prisoners.’ ”

  Charlotte was in town when Villette was published on 28 January 1853, to widespread and for the most part very laudatory reviews. Charlotte reported to Ellen that she had received seven good notices on two consecutive days in February, enough “to make my heart swell with thankfulness to Him who takes note both of suffering and work and motives—Papa is pleased too.” The reviewer in the Literary Gazette acknowledged the book’s strange evanescent qualities, the trance-like movement between states of mind rather than scenes, by saying “It must be read continuously,—we had almost said, studied, before its finest qualities can be appreciated,” while G. H. Lewes brought weight to bear in the Leader with resounding praise that delighted the author: “In Passion and Power—those noble twins of Genius—Currer Bell has no living rival, except George Sand. Hers is the passionate heart to feel, and the powerful brain to give feeling shape; and that is why she is so original, so fascinating.”

  “Currer Bell might have called her new novel ‘Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself,’ ” said the Spectator, drolly acknowledging the almost plodding drabness of the plot, and how little the plot mattered among so many “violent emotions of the heart.” That Charlotte had wondered how the book would be received in Brussels is clear from the fact that she tried to retain control over any possible translation of it into French; but, while she waited to see if there was any response from the rue d’Isabelle, she became aware of the amusing effect her portrait of Monsieur Paul was having elsewhere. Several letters reached her, via Smith, Elder, from women wanting to know more about the fate of the harsh, demanding, secretly honourable and devoted Master. “You see how much the ladies think of this little man whom none of you like,” she teased Williams. One correspondent who had previously determined to marry only the counterpart of Mr. Knightley (from Jane Austen’s Emma) “now…vowed that she would either find the duplicate of Professor Emanuel or remain forever single!!!”

  The focus on Lucy’s hunger for sexual love, so desperately and unconventionally aimed first at Dr. John and then at Monsieur Paul, did not escape notice or censure, most prominently from Harriet Martineau, whose review in the Daily News was one of the first to appear. She had written privately in advance to Charlotte, who, for all her talk of welcoming criticism of her novel, was upset that Martineau disliked the treatment of love in it, “either the kind or the degree.” In her printed review, Martineau expanded this theme, pointing out, with some justice, the disservice it did to women to represent them as such abject slaves to one emotion. Charlotte reacted in her most high-falutin manner. Having made such a show of championing Miss Martineau against critics of her atheism, she felt she was owed more loyalty than this. Before the review even appeared, she remonstrated with Martineau: “I know what love is as I understand it—& if man or woman shd. feel ashamed of feeling such lo
ve—then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth as I comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth & disinterestedness.” It is strange that Charlotte tried to represent in such a heroic light her anatomy of desire and not “love” but love sickness, so brilliantly but unheroically depicted in Lucy Snowe’s haunted, hungry soul.

  There were other, fiercer, critics, whose opinions Charlotte never got to hear. Matthew Arnold hated the book because it dealt too clearly with a malaise among middle-class women—their frustrations and unanswered desires in both love and the world—which he did not like to contemplate: “the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact put into her book.” But it was exactly this power to discomfit people that made Charlotte’s work valuable to others. The very elements that made Arnold avert his eyes made George Eliot (yet to publish any novels herself) think Villette “a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.” “Villette—Villette—” she wrote a month later, “have you read it?”

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  ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS HAD chosen his time to declare himself shrewdly. No doubt he had waited deliberately until Charlotte’s novel, so long in the making, was finished and sent off to London, knowing how preoccupied she would be until then and unreceptive to his suit. Not knowing the contents of the book, he could not have guessed how much it related to questions of choices in love, right and wrong desires and decisions. When she went down to London to oversee the correction of proofs and wait for the book’s reception, Charlotte had plenty of time to think about Nicholls in this powerful new light and wonder what her experience of love had come to up to this point; where she should have been looking for it, and where she might have found it.