Apart from Emily’s agitation about the trip, it had been wonderful in every way. Charlotte and Anne had stayed in Paternoster Row, in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the Chapter Coffee House, which had once been a meeting place for luminaries such as Dr. Johnson—“the resort of all the booksellers and publishers; and where the literary hacks, the critics, and even the wits, used to go in search of ideas or employment,” as Elizabeth Gaskell would describe it in her biography of Charlotte.
The sisters’ arrival at the publisher’s office was priceless: when Charlotte showed up, along with Anne, Smith was confused by the sudden appearance of two “rather quaintly dressed little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking.” (He wasn’t joking about the “little” part—at five feet three, Emily was the tallest of the sisters; Charlotte was a mere four feet nine.) He was also annoyed because the two strangers—women, at that—had shown up uninvited on a busy workday demanding to see him. They declined to give their names. “One of them came forward and presented me with a letter—addressed in my own handwriting to ‘Currer Bell, Esq.,’” he recalled. “I noticed that the letter had been opened, and said with some sharpness: ‘Where did you get this from?’ ‘From the post office,’ was the reply. ‘It was addressed to me. We have both come that you might have ocular proof that there are at least two of us.’”
However much Smith had suspected Currer Bell to be a woman, at first he could not put two and two together in the presence of Charlotte Brontë. Utterly stunned, he looked at the letter and at his author and back again at the letter. It took him a few moments to recover from his shock; Charlotte tried to suppress a laugh. As the truth dawned on Smith, he received them graciously—insisting that the sisters extend their London visit and entertaining them with trips to the opera, art museums, and more. Charlotte cautioned him that although they had disclosed the truth about their identities, the revelation should go no further: “To all the rest of the world we must remain ‘gentlemen’ as heretofore.”
Because Smith could not tell anyone who his companions really were, his family and friends were perplexed as to why he had brought “a couple of odd-looking countrywomen,” as Charlotte wryly recalled, to dine with them one evening. They were introduced as “the Misses Brown.” What the urbane young Londoner was doing socializing with “these insignificant spinsters” was anyone’s guess, but in typical British fashion, no one spoke of it. Charlotte and Anne were amused at the awkwardness and dazzled by the grandeur of Smith’s family residence.
He later described Anne as “a gentle, quiet, rather subdued person, by no means pretty, yet of a pleasing appearance.” Though he was fascinated by Charlotte and awestruck by her intellect, his appraisal of her appearance confirmed there was no danger of falling in love with his unmasked author (though her feelings for him were far more complex). For one thing, he took note of her missing teeth and her ruddy complexion. Also, “Her head seemed too large for her body. . . . There was but little feminine charm about her; and of this fact she was herself uneasily and perpetually conscious.” Charlotte once lamented her “almost repulsive” plainness to her dear friend Elizabeth Gaskell, but understood that her power lay elsewhere. “Though I knew I looked a poor creature,” she wrote, “and in many respects actually was so, nature had given me a voice that could make itself heard, if lifted in excitement or deepened by emotion.”
She returned home from her London trip tired but giddy at having unburdened herself. The future seemed full of promise.
Instead, the next year of her life would bring extraordinary suffering. The dissolute lost soul, Branwell, died in September of tuberculosis. His sisters never told him about the novels they’d published. In a letter to W. S. Williams a month after Branwell’s death, Charlotte admitted, “I do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light.”
The worst was still to come. Emily caught a severe cold at Branwell’s funeral and had difficulty breathing. Her health deteriorated steadily from then on, and she did not leave the house again. She developed consumption but refused medical treatment, and her behavior became increasingly erratic; she would not rest or eat and bristled at familial displays of sympathy. (Charlotte described witnessing her sister’s abrupt decline as causing “pain no words can render.”) Just thirty years old, Emily died on December 19, 1848, at two o’clock in the afternoon. Three days later a memorial service was held, and her beloved bulldog, Keeper, accompanied the family to the church. (After her death, he had howled outside her door.) Emily was buried in the vault of the same church where her mother and brother now lay. Her coffin was only seventeen inches wide.
“For my part I am free to walk on the moors,” Charlotte wrote later, “but when I go out there alone—everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening—My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her.” Charlotte did not think she could go on as a writer: “Worse than useless did it seem to attempt to write what there no longer lived an ‘Ellis Bell’ to read,” she informed her publisher.
Because Anne had shared a bedroom with Emily, it was not entirely shocking that in January 1849 Anne was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She had managed to publish another novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the year before, but it would be her last. As if she’d had a presentiment of her death, in the sharply worded preface to the novel’s second edition she boldly defended the need for authorial privacy. The essay reads almost as a manifesto:
Respecting the author’s identity, I would have it to be distinctly understood that Acton Bell is neither Currer nor Ellis Bell, and therefore let not his faults be attributed to them. As to whether the name be real or fictitious, it cannot greatly signify to those who know him only by his works. As little, I should think, can it matter whether the writer so designated is a man, or a woman, as one or two of my critics profess to have discovered. I take the imputation in good part, as a compliment to the just delineation of my female characters; and though I am bound to attribute much of the severity of my censors to this suspicion, I make no effort to refute it, because, in my own mind, I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.
July 22nd, 1848.
Anne died on the afternoon of May 28, 1849, at the age of twenty-nine. A lifelong friend of Charlotte later recalled the last words Anne had uttered to her sister: “Take courage, Charlotte.”
“When my thoughts turn to Anne,” Charlotte said of her sister, “they always see her as a patient, persecuted stranger,—more lonely, less gifted with the power of making friends even than I am.” She wrote a poem in Anne’s memory that began, “There’s little joy in life for me, / And little terror in the grave; / I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save.”
In life, Anne had been overshadowed by her sisters (and her legacy remains so), yet her preface is a deeply captivating personal d
ocument, remarkable for its forcefulness of expression and eloquence. Her argument is also impossible to refute.
As the only survivor of her siblings, Charlotte was inconsolable. “Why life is so blank, brief and bitter I do not know,” she wrote. Her faith sustained her: “God has upheld me. From my heart I thank Him.” She proceeded with her next novel, Shirley, which she completed in August 1849. “[T]hough I earnestly wish to preserve my incognito,” she wrote to her editor, “I live under no slavish fear of discovery—I am ashamed of nothing I have written—not a line.” Still, she thanked him for preserving her secret.
That Shirley is considered her weakest novel can be forgiven, considering the circumstances under which it was written. Regardless, it had been a balm for the author, who admitted to her editor that in the aftermath of enormous losses, work was her favorite companion: “[H]ereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give.”
It was published in October to mostly respectable reviews, and Charlotte said that she would have to be a “conceited ape” to be dissatisfied with them. But the best thing to come of the book’s publication was a warm letter from Elizabeth Gaskell. In response, Charlotte explained, “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.” Aside from keeping up the nom de plume, the sentiments expressed in Charlotte’s letter were completely honest.
Gaskell was delighted at having extracted some small bit of biographical information from the mysterious author. She excitedly wrote to a friend: “Currer Bell (aha! What will you give me for a secret?) She’s a she—that I will tell you.”
In 1850, Charlotte’s social circle began to widen, and she met Mrs. Gaskell in person during a visit to the Lake District. “She is a woman of the most genuine talent,” Charlotte said, “of cheerful, pleasing and cordial manners and—I believe—of a kind and good heart.” They became close, and Gaskell’s loving and sympathetic (if flawed) biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (published in 1857), is still considered one of the great works of Victorian literature. Gaskell’s book was significant for being the first full-length biography of a woman novelist written by another woman. The legend, long upheld by scholars and readers alike, of Charlotte as the saintly sister—dutiful, modest, almost mouselike, and above reproach—can be traced to Gaskell, who created it.
After the deaths of her sisters, Charlotte made regular visits to London, where she had the privilege of meeting writers she admired, including Thackeray. She attended lectures, saw plays, and visited museums. She even sat for a portrait by the popular artist George Richmond—a gift from George Smith to Charlotte’s father that now resides in London’s National Portrait Gallery, along with Branwell’s iconic painting of Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, circa 1835, with his own image inexplicably blurred out of the portrait.
Even as she extended herself beyond Haworth, Charlotte remained discreet about her alter ego. She railed against “vulgar notoriety,” yet speculation was rampant. She was even openly confronted, though she tried to brush such incidents aside. One evening, at a dinner party at Thackeray’s home, the author called Charlotte “Currer Bell” in front of the other guests. She was not amused. “I believe there are books being published by a person named Currer Bell,” she said curtly, “but the person you address is Miss Brontë—and I see no connection between the two.” (Thackeray had himself used various noms de plume in his early works, including Michael Angelo Titmarsh, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, and Charles James Yellowplush.)
Charlotte was also on the defensive with George Lewes, who had initially praised her work, offering advice and encouragement, but who began lecturing “Bell” sternly in his letters and then maligning the author in reviews. She entered reluctantly into what became a rather contentious correspondence. It seems bizarre that the man who would become George Eliot’s most passionate supporter just a few years later would engage in reductive criticism on grounds of gender, but he did. “I wish you did not think me a woman,” she wrote to him in 1849. “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.” She went on: “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.”
Lewes ignored her response, reviewing Shirley in the Edinburgh Review and finding fault with the work based on the author’s gender. (The headlines of the article’s first two pages read, “Mental Equality of the Sexes?” and “Female Literature.”) Charlotte was outraged and hurt by what she viewed as his cruelty toward her, and at having her fiction judged by a double standard. The note she subsequently addressed to “G. H. Lewes, Esq.” was damning and brief: “I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.” It was signed “Currer Bell.” (About a year later, after Charlotte met him in person, she said, “I cannot hate him.”)
At home as well, her secret had begun to unravel. Her father had started telling neighbors who his daughter was. Excited fans made pilgrimages to the village, hoping to come upon the genius in person. And on February 28, 1850, a local newspaper announced, in a burst of pride, that Charlotte Brontë, the reverend’s daughter, was “the authoress of Jane Eyre and Shirley, two of the most popular novels of the day, which have appeared under the name of ‘Currer Bell.’” The charade was officially over.
In 1851, thirty-five-year-old Charlotte received the third marriage proposal of her life and the third she would decline. (When the latest suitor approached her to propose, Charlotte admitted, “my veins ran ice.”) Caring for her aging father, and suffering from health problems of her own, including a liver infection, she was lonely—but she didn’t want a husband.
Discouraging her further was the news that despite all her success, Smith, Elder still declined to publish The Professor. The firm suggested that she instead begin work on a new novel, and she did—often in a state of despair. Two years later, Villette was published. The title page read, “VILLETTE. BY CURRER BELL, AUTHOR OF ‘JANE EYRE,’ ‘SHIRLEY,’ ETC.” Feeling burned after having her pseudonymous cover unmasked, Charlotte longed to become invisible again. She had asked George Smith if he might consider publishing Villette under yet another pen name: “I should be much thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito,” she implored. But “Currer Bell” was now an enviable brand in Victorian society; “he” was a towering figure whose name on a book almost guaranteed sales. The publisher reluctantly denied her request.
Villette, which Virginia Woolf would later deem to be Brontë’s “finest novel,” drew on Charlotte’s own breakdowns and was her most overt exploration to date of the struggle between a woman’s will and the constraints of society. Even though it made demands on the reader and lacked a happy ending, it proved a great success. George Eliot, then still known as Mary Ann Evans, read it three times. “I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre,” she wrote to a friend. “There is something almost preternatural about its power.” Sh
e would later praise Charlotte to George Lewes, who had met Charlotte and saw her as a plain “old maid.” Eliot, however, recognized the beauty of Charlotte’s inner life: “What passion, what fire in her!” she said. “Quite as much as in George Sand, only the clothing is less voluptuous.” Charlotte happened to have great respect for Sand, whom she considered “sagacious and profound”; this favorable view was in contrast to her opinion of Jane Austen’s work, which she found uninteresting, with its “ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
In 1853, Charlotte was just two years from her death. She’d begun writing yet another novel, but abandoned it after reluctantly marrying her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had pursued her for years. (The sisters’ pseudonymous surname was taken from his middle name.) She consented to marry Nicholls in June 1854, only a short time after George Smith had married. (That event was quite painful for Charlotte to digest.) She married Nicholls accepting that there was only companionship, not passion, between them. At least she would no longer be alone. “Doubtless then it is the best for me,” she wrote to a friend. Soon after marrying, she offered a sober assessment of her new role: “It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. . . . My time is not my own now.”
In the early hours of March 31, 1855, Charlotte died at the age of thirty-eight. She is believed to have been pregnant at the time.
The defiant opening stanza of Emily Brontë’s most famous poem conveys the inspiring resilience and fierce spirit of Emily, Anne, and Charlotte:
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
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