by E. F. Benson
Currer Bell’s book was published on October 16, and was an instant success not only with the ordinary fiction-reading public, but with the literary world. Thackeray’s praise, conveyed in a letter to the publishers, was particularly pleasing to Charlotte, for she already admired his work (Vanity Fair was at the time coming out in parts), and his admiration of Jane Eyre accentuated her belief in his judgment. ‘No author,’ she wrote, ‘seems to distinguish so exquisitely as he does dross from ore, the real from the counterfeit. I believed too he had deep and true feelings under his seeming sternness. Now I am sure he has....’
The popular enthusiasm over Jane Eyre as well as that of the literary world was not to be wondered at. The plot, though wholly incredible, is highly exciting; it teems with the stimulating impossibilities of shockers and best sellers. Mr. Rochester for years kept a lunatic wife on the third floor of his country-house, in charge of a gin-drinking maid, instead of putting her in an asylum, and none of the other servants nor Jane Eyre, who was governess to Mr. Rochester’s illegitimate child, knew anything about it. The house resounded with her demoniac laughter: she attempted to burn her husband in his bed, she bit her brother, and on the eve of the wedding of Jane Eyre to Rochester, she came to her room in the middle of the night and tore her bridal veil in half. No scruple about committing bigamy ever entered Rochester’s head; he blandly proposed to marry the eighteen-year-old governess of his illegitimate child, and his intention was only thwarted by the intervention at the marriage-service itself of his brother-in-law and his lawyer. He then suggested to Jane Eyre that, since he had been prevented from tricking her into a bogus marriage, she should become his mistress. This she refused to do, and, though still madly adoring him and unresentful of his monstrous deception, ran away, and after spending her last penny on a coach fare, left her belongings in the coach, and scoured the country on foot for two days. Finally she dropped, dripping and exhausted, on the threshold of the house where her three first cousins happened to live, of whose existence she was not aware, but who were the only relations she had in the world. She then found that she was the heiress of an uncle who had died leaving her £20,000, which she divided up between her cousins and herself. Her male cousin, Rev. St. John Rivers, who was going out to be a missionary in India, decided that she must accompany him. It would cause scandal if they were not married, and so he told her that, though they were not in the least in love with each other, she must become his wife. Previously she had felt not the slightest interest in anything connected with missions, but she consented to go out with him, though not as his wife, and for that purpose learned Hindustanee. He still insisted on marriage, and she was on the point of yielding when she heard a phantom voice coming from the moonlit night calling ‘Jane, Jane!’ She knew it to be the voice of Edward Rochester, and ran out into the garden exclaiming, ‘Where are you?’ No answer came, and she commented: ‘Down superstition. This is not thy deception nor thy witchcraft, it is the work of nature. She was roused and did — no miracle — but her best.’ So she hurried back to Thornfield, and found that Mrs. Rochester had again set fire to the house, that a burning beam had fallen on her husband when he tried to rescue her, and that he was stone blind. The maniac had jumped off the roof and was killed. So Jane Eyre sought him out and married him. He recovered his sight and they had a baby.
Such is the mere plot of Jane Eyre, a tissue of violences, absurdities, and coincidences, not less ludicrous than those glimpses of high life, in which Blanche Ingram of the ‘raven ringlets and the oriental eye’ addresses her mother as ‘Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park,’ and says to the footman, ‘Cease thy chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding.’ The didactic passages, of which there are many, the hortatory passages (as when Jane Eyre draws a picture of herself in chalks, ‘smoothing away no displeasing irregularity,’ and then an imaginary and ideal portrait of Miss Ingram, in order to cure herself of her vain aspirations towards Mr. Rochester) are written in a style of incredible pomposity:
Order! No Snivel — no sentiment — no regret! (thus she addresses herself) I will endure only sense and resolution. Recall the august yet harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust; let the round and dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand; omit neither diamond ring nor gold bracelet ... call it ‘Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank.’
But over all such extravagances the greatness of the book rises triumphant and supreme by reason of its beauty and its white-hot sincerity: all its faults are consumed in that furnace. Never before in the history of English fiction had there been anything to approach this picture of pure passion, not only of a man for a woman, but of a woman for a man. To the delicacies and pruderies of the early Victorian age the shock must have been terrific, but high and low, rich and poor, found that it was no use being shocked; they had to read it, and it was its fiery splendour rather than the shock of it that left them gasping. It was in no sense a designed revolt against the conventions of the day in literature and living: it merely disregarded them, was unconscious of them. Charlotte was not preaching, she was telling a story about an insignificant little woman who knew what she meant when she spoke of love, its sufferings and its fiery quality which burns up like dross all sentimentality and softness. The message in her book spoke direct to the soul of humanity, and instantly it had its architectural place in the literature of the world, weight-bearing and massive. Often and often in herself the larger vision, the sweep of the serene sky, was obscured as with clouds and peevish squalls, with censoriousness and bitterness, with want of compassion and decrying judgments, with the desire to preach and to scold, but behind was this clear shining.
Naturally, as is always the case when something new and startling and disturbing leaps to light, there were bitter criticisms of her work which, as was equally natural in one of her temperament, she bitterly resented. But she insisted on seeing all unfavourable reviews, and though her avowed object was to profit by them, the real effect of them was to make her blood boil with a sense of their injustice and stupidity.
It would take a good deal to crush me [she robustly wrote to Mr. Williams], because I know in the first place that my intentions were correct, that I feel in my heart a deep reverence for religion, that impiety is very abhorrent to me; and in the second I place firm reliance in the judgment of some who have encouraged me.
In fact, so far from being crushed, adverse criticism only caused her to take the gloomiest views of the character of those who expressed it.
I was aware [she wrote to her old mistress, Miss Wooler] that some persons thought proper to take exception to Jane Eyre, and that for their own sakes I was sorry, as I invariably found them individuals in whom the animal largely predominated over the intellectual, persons by nature coarse, by inclination sensual.
Most of all she resented any speculation as to the sex of Currer Bell; that seemed a most unwarrantable prying into her private affairs and she could not see that such a curiosity was legitimate. She believed that a woman novelist was not taken seriously either by the public or the critics; she did not have a chance, and Charlotte wanted her work to be judged as if it were the work of a man. Besides, there was the secret of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to keep, and though her publishers suspected Currer Bell was a woman, she did not yet reveal herself even to them.
It was not till December, when the success of Jane Eyre had made it what we now call ‘the novel of the season,’ that her sisters induced Charlotte to tell Mr. Brontë of her fame. She gave Mrs. Gaskell an account of the announcement in a delicious bit of dialogue.
‘Papa, I’ve been writing a book.’
‘Have you, my dear?’
‘Yes, I want you to read it.’
‘I am afraid it will try my eyes too much.’ [Charlotte wrote a microscopic hand.]
‘But it is not in manuscript; it is printed.’
‘My dear! You’ve never thought of the expense it will be. It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold? No one knows you or your nam
e.’
‘But, papa, I don’t think it will be a loss; no more will you if you will just let me read you a review or two, and tell you more about it.’
This was done, and he came in to tea, and said, ‘Girls, do you know Charlotte has been writing a book and it is much better than likely?’
Evidently, then, Mr. Brontë knew nothing about the joint book of poems, or about Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, which also came out in December 1847. The sisters had paid £50 for the printing and publishing of 350 copies, but it appears that the publisher only printed 250 copies. There was journalistic speculation as to the actual authorship of Wuthering Heights; it was suggested that it was an earlier and immature work by the author of Jane Eyre, but Charlotte at present took little heed of such attributions: ‘the critics,’ she wrote to Mr. Williams, ‘are welcome to confuse our identities as much as they choose.’
Wuthering Heights appears to have sold decently, but it attracted no critical homage for many months yet, and Charlotte’s occasional allusions to it in her letters show how little appreciation she herself had of it, and how profoundly she misunderstood it and the savagery of its supreme genius. Writing, for instance, of Heathcliff, that masterpiece of wild pagan passion, she says: ‘The worst of it is some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative, in which he figures, it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the Heights.’ She did not see that the terrific and appalling impression that moor and glen and fir-tree are permeated by Heathcliff is not ‘the worst of it,’ but that in this very point, namely, that he is somehow incarnate of the wild moorland, there lies the proof and the very seal of the genius of the book. She unmistakably sounds a note of apology, of excuse for Emily.
Ellis [she informed Mr. Williams] has a strong original mind, full of strange though sombre power. When he writes poetry that power speaks in language at once condensed, elaborated and refined, but in prose it breaks forth in scenes which shock more than they attract. Ellis will improve, however, because he knows his defects.
But she thought that neither poetry nor fiction were really Ellis’s forte, for to the same correspondent she writes, ‘I should say Ellis will not be seen in his full strength till he is seen as an essayist.’ It seems scarcely credible that she was writing about the author of Wuthering Heights, and one vainly and impotently wonders what sort of essay it would be and on what subject, that would reveal the full strength of Emily Brontë which Wuthering Heights only partially disclosed. Still, sticking up for her sister, Charlotte says she would not be ashamed to have written it. Her maturer reflections about Wuthering Heights, when she re-read it, belong to a later period. Of Agnes Grey all she says is that it is the mirror of the mind of the writer. From this judgment it is impossible to differ.
With the publication and success of Jane Eyre the twilight of nothingness, to which at one time there had seemed to Charlotte to be no end but the complete darkness of age and death, had given place to the most brilliant dawn. Her horizons and possibilities had endlessly expanded, the tonic of success had vivified her. In January 1848 a second edition of Jane Eyre was issued, and she wrote a militant preface to it, in which her views about her critics were expressed with singular directness. She thanked the public and her publishers, and portions of the Press, namely, the ‘select reviewers’ who ‘had encouraged her as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how.’ Then there were some resounding smacks for ‘the timorous and carping few who doubted the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre.’ She reminded them that: ‘Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.’ Then followed a panegyric on Thackeray, to whom she dedicated this second edition. He was an eagle compared with that carrion-feeding vulture Fielding: he came before high Society like the son of Imlah before the Kings of Israel and Judah, and hurled at it the Greek fire of his sarcasm and the levin bolt of his denunciation: they had better attend to him if they wished to escape a Ramoth-gilead. Thackeray, she was afraid, did not much care for this dedication — which seems probable, for, when thanking her for it, he told her that he, like Mr. Rochester, had a mad wife, and people said that Jane Eyre was written by his governess.
This second edition sold well, and soon after there arose the question of its dramatisation and production at some minor theatre. Charlotte shuddered at the thought of seeing it, but steeled herself to endure the ‘rant and whine, strut and grimace for the sake of the useful observations to be collected in such a scene.’ Nothing apparently came of this, but a year afterwards it was dramatised by John Brougham and produced in New York.
Among those who had been immensely struck with Jane Eyre was G. H. Lewes, who wrote to her that he intended to contribute a review of it to Fraser’s Magazine. Charlotte had not heard of him before, but she now got his novel Ranthorpe, which she highly praised, and subsequently Rose Blanche and Violet, of which the ‘didactic passages profound and acute’ pleased her best. The correspondence between them is chiefly notable for her views on Jane Austen. Lewes had held her up as a master of technique, so Charlotte got Pride and Prejudice on his recommendation. It was a matter of amazement to her that anyone could admire it. She only found
an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face: a carefully fenced highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers: but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
Shrewd and discreet Jane Austen might be, but nothing more. Lewes tried again: he conceded that Jane Austen had no poetry, ‘no sentiment,’ but told Charlotte that she ‘must learn to acknowledge her as one of the greatest artists, of the greatest painters of human nature, and one of the writers with the nicest sense of means to an end that ever lived.’ But that lack of poetry condemned her to Charlotte’s sense: Miss Austen might be sensible, she might be real, but she could not be great. Years after she tried Emma, but it was quite hopeless: her final conclusion was that Jane Austen was a ‘very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman.’ The explanation of her entire want of appreciation, as has been already suggested, seems to be that Charlotte was, in actual fact, entirely devoid of any subtle sense of humour, and therefore could not understand Jane Austen’s.
In her contract with Messrs. Smith, Elder for Jane Eyre, Charlotte had promised them to give them the refusal of two further novels. Jane Eyre must have been scarcely out before she set to work again, for less than two months afterwards she had made three attempts to start a fresh book, none of which satisfied her. One of these, probably, was the fragment of thirty-six pages, unpublished in her lifetime, called The Moores. It is usually assigned to a later date, circa 1852, but it is unlikely that after the publication of Shirley, in which the Moores figure so largely, she should have chosen such a title. She then read over the discarded Professor again, finding the beginning very feeble, and noting its deficiency in incident. ‘Yet the middle and latter portion of the work,’ so she wrote to Mr. Williams, ‘all that relates to Brussels and the Belgian school, etc., is as good as I can write.’ She therefore proposed to recast it and make a three-volume novel of it, but asked Mr. Williams’s advice on the subject, for The Professor had already been refused by his firm. We gather that he was against it, for Charlotte dropped the idea and at once began on Shirley, taking up, probably, one of her previous three attempts. It is interesting to observe that the idea of doing something with The Professor had already entered her mind. She was right enough in her depreciation of it, as it stood, and she was eminently right in realising that the Brussels section contained the germ of a masterpiece. Again she put it back to simmer in her mind and made it the stock-pot for Villette.
With all these new interests and correspondences to occupy her, Charlotte’s letters to Ellen were f
ew; perhaps she found it difficult to write to so old a friend and refrain from any allusion to what filled her mind and energies. She had bitter things to say about Mrs. Robinson. ‘That woman is a hopeless being: calculated to bring a curse wherever she goes, by the mixture of weakness, perversion and deceit in her nature.’ The reason for this outburst was evident, for in another letter of close date she says:
Branwell has, by some means, contrived to get more money from the old quarter, and has led us a sad life with his absurd and often intolerable conduct. Papa is harassed day and night; we have little peace: he (Branwell) is always sick, has two or three times fallen down in fits, what will be the ultimate end, God knows. But who is without these drawbacks, these scourges, these skeletons behind the curtain?
We gather that Miss Ringrose’s devotion to Ellen still flourished, for she had written to Charlotte almost entirely about her, with ‘a kind of gentle enthusiasm of affection enough to make one at once smile and weep — her feelings are half truth, half illusion. No human being could be what she supposes you to be.’ The two friends exchanged birthday letters in April, for their anniversaries fell on the same day, and Charlotte, now thirty-two, felt that youth was irrevocably over; over also was her own youthful devotion to Ellen which had once gilded her with all the perfections that Miss Ringrose so pathetically found in her still.
Then Ellen, who, some six months before, had seen Charlotte correcting the proof sheets of Jane Eyre under her very eyes, and who therefore must have known all along that Charlotte had a book in the press, summoned up her courage to break silence, and wrote that a report had reached her that Charlotte had written a book. The vehemence of Charlotte’s reply probably carried conviction that this report was perfectly true, for under cover of an indignant virtual denial she never denied anything at all.