by Deborah Lutz
As the sisters filled their days with the usual walking, chores, reading, and writing, they felt the smallness of their house. Emily, especially, needed to carve out pockets of privacy in the crowded rooms. In the fall of 1845, she was working on a Gondal poem that praised the cultivation of inwardness. So, as Charlotte poured out her soul to Heger and sent flirty letters and seals to Ellen, Emily labored over “Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle,” later retitled “The Prisoner.” A young woman jailed in a dungeon-crypt figures out how to be happy by feeding on inner visions, which rise up when “winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire” and then can “kill me with desire.” Needing no fellowship, or even any freedom of movement, her imagination is enough for her to slip her bonds. Around the same time Emily was recording this poem into the Gondal notebook in October, Charlotte “accidently lighted on” it, rather ironically given that it is about lone inspiration. One wonders where Charlotte was snooping when she found it. Did she discover it by peeking into Emily’s desk? If Emily kept her desk locked, then Charlotte’s “accidental” discovery seems something worthy of Madame Beck from Villette. Charlotte snuck away with the notebook and read it “alone and in secret.” So excited by the poems’ “peculiar music,” Charlotte confessed her transgression to Emily. Emily was furious, not being a person “on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed,” as Charlotte explained the incident and her sister’s reaction. Emily sternly berated her for this “unwarrantable liberty,” this exposure of her private world by her nosy sister.18
Their relationship continued to grow knotty as they became adults, Charlotte’s need for intimacy increasingly clashing with Emily’s deeply reserved nature. Profoundly entwined emotionally and spending their days at such close quarters, the two couldn’t avoid explosions, like the one over Emily’s private notebook. Charlotte found Emily’s impenetrability baffling, and she couldn’t help but push against it. It was likely Charlotte’s need to understand Emily that led her to read Emily’s poetry notebook, perhaps by penetrating the recesses of Emily’s desk.19
Charlotte tried to assuage her sister’s anger: it took many hours. Anne helped, taking a conciliatory role as she often did, by bringing Charlotte some of her own poems to read. This led Charlotte to campaign for publication, something she had long been pondering. Days were spent trying to convince Emily to publish. “By dint of entreaty and reason,” Charlotte later wrote, she “at last wrung out a reluctant consent” to publish the verse of all three in one volume. It is curious that Emily agreed, given her reluctance to let even her sisters read her poems, although she insisted they write under the ambiguously gendered pseudonyms that still retained their initials: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. “ ‘Ellis Bell’ will not endure to be alluded to under any other appellation,” Charlotte explained to her later publishers when they found out the real identities of the sisters, “than the ‘nom de plume’ . . . it is against every feeling and intention” of “him.”20
Such pen names were nothing new to the three, who had been writing under similar ones, about the lands of Gondal and Angria, since they were children. They started with those toy soldiers, which they snatched up, made into their alter egos, then further transformed into writing personas. The most recent versions of the writing soldiers—of the genies, kings, and queens—the Bell disguises had something in common with script too small to read, closed up in boxes, and sealed or locked away, all forms of keeping a vital portion back. Although it was Emily’s drive for secrecy that led to their adoption of these alternate identities, Charlotte also had an “ostrich-longing for concealment,” as she called it, even after the public began to figure out that Currer Bell was some obscure clergyman’s daughter called Charlotte Brontë. A need to pass invisible among others lasted throughout her lifetime, in equal measure with a relish for adulation.
Their volume of poetry provoked many rejections. They finally managed to convince the minor firm of Aylott and Jones to bring it out, if the authors paid the expenses of thirty-one pounds and ten shillings, close to a year’s salary for most governesses. The slim book, entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, appeared in May 1846, bound in green cloth with a geometric design on the front surrounding the title, and the price of four shillings printed just under it, an unwelcome touch of the commercial. Poems by the three traded off at points and at other times appeared coupled.
The book sold only two copies. Yet it served the purpose of nudging open a window of possibility. Now published authors, even if only in a very small way, they felt some confidence about sending out their novels, which were well under way when their poetry volume came out. The tension between Charlotte’s pushiness and Emily’s resistance possibly provided the true impetus for publication and even for the writing of their novels. Without this complex form of collaboration, with its anger and strife, their great masterworks might never have been published, or even written.
The collaborative nature of the creation of their novels had a peripatetic quality. Composing on their own during the day—sometimes at their writing desks but also on tables and in bed—they paced together around the gate-legged dining room table after nine o’clock most evenings, talking over their plots and characters and reading passages aloud for feedback. This habit of nocturnal exercise and thought indoors dated back at least to Charlotte’s time with Miss Wooler at Roe Head School, and she would continue it alone even after her sisters died. These writing “workshops” helped drive them to finish their first novels in less than a year. The masses of fiction they had been churning out since childhood also worked as steady preparation for their burst of effort now.21
Charlotte came to these evenings with pages of what would become The Professor, her short novel written from the point of view of one William Crimsworth, a dry and dispassionate man. Anne was working through her largely autobiographical story of a governess’s life, Agnes Grey; and Emily, the gothic dreamscape of Wuthering Heights. The two former works had a good deal in common, being realistic, unadorned tales about ordinary Victorian working life. Even though Charlotte reused part of an old story for its first few chapters, The Professor strikes one as the production of a sober adult. Wuthering Heights came, contrarily, straight out of the land of Gondal. Charlotte expressed her misgivings about the otherworldly passions of Wuthering Heights during their nighttime pacing, as she would do publicly after Emily’s death. “In its storm-heated and electrical atmosphere,” Charlotte later grumbled, “we seem at times to breathe lightning.” This was a result, she felt, of her sister’s mind being “too exclusively confined” to the terrible and tragic, something that Charlotte hoped would have changed if Emily had lived longer, giving her mind the chance to grow “like a strong tree, loftier, straighter.” She described the reactions of the “auditor” of Emily’s work “when read in manuscript”—surely Charlotte herself—who, “shuddering under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen . . . complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day.” When the “auditor” told “Ellis Bell” this, “Ellis” wondered what was meant and suspected the complainer of “affectation.” Emily surely did some criticizing of her own, probably about the lack of fire in The Professor.22
Charlotte, for one, saw the importance of hammering out her novels in close fellowship, even one troubled by competition among fierce natures. Composing a novel after her sisters died meant fabricating “it darkly in the silent workshop” of her own brain. She couldn’t even put into words “how much I hunger to have some opinion besides my own, and how I have sometimes desponded and almost despaired because there was no one to whom to read a line—or of whom to ask a counsel. ‘Jane Eyre’ was not written under such circumstances.” In fact, despite Charlotte’s reservations about Wuthering Heights and her attempts to convince Emily to make it less relentless, she was deeply under its inf
luence when she wrote Jane Eyre. To Emily’s novel she owed the heavy doses of passion, insanity, and imprisonment.23
Other aspects of the composition of these first novels are more difficult to reconstruct. None of Anne’s or Emily’s novel manuscripts exist, either in drafts or as fair copies, presumably going the way of the Gondal saga. Anne composed most of her poetry in an ordinary cursive hand, without the pictures and doodles of Emily’s drafts, giving them a saner quality, as if she had always been ready to meet a public, unlike Emily, who never was. Anne also copied her verse into notebooks, some hand bound, much of it written while at her governess jobs, likely on her writing slope. When she wasn’t working on her poetry, she probably locked the manuscript in her desk to keep it away from the ill-behaved children of her employers. Later, when Anne settled into living at home, caught up in the mood of writing her second novel, Charlotte observed her “continually sitting stooping either over a book or over her desk—it is with difficulty one can prevail on her to take a walk or induce her to converse.”24
Since the servants reported seeing Emily often scribbling away while at her housework, the process of composing on odds and ends, as for her poems, likely continued with her novel. Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor once said, when Charlotte told her about the endless tales of Angria and Gondal, that it was like the siblings were “growing potatoes in the cellar.” “Yes! I know we are!” Charlotte replied. Emily never really emerged from that cellar, it might be said, and Anne only ever descended a step or two into it. Charlotte went all the way down, but she could also go all the way up to the attic.25
Emily found pens troublesome. Her fight with her pens is apparent on her stained writing slope and also on her manuscripts: Blots dropped onto the page, penetrating through to the other side and interfering with the poem on the verso. She dug her nib into the paper; her pen ran out of ink as she wrote. Her nib would become clogged with sediment from the dregs of the ink bottle, and she cleaned it by dragging it along the page. Her blotting paper has holes in it from hasty nib clearing. Pen-wipers were the more tidy means to clean excess ink off nibs. Charlotte had handmade ones, typical craft items made by women and given as gifts. Her brown, green, and blue pen-wiper with a beaded edge probably came from the needles of Ellen, sent in a package with sickbed items for Anne when she was dying of tuberculosis.26
Emily grappled first with quill pens, made from goose feathers, that the siblings dipped into those ink bottles to write the Gondal and Angria tales. They began using wooden holders with detachable, metal nibs by the time they started their novels. Emily and Charlotte had wood pens and nibs, first patented in 1831 by Joseph Gillott, a Birmingham button maker, in their desk and paint boxes, alongside quill ones. Simpler and faster to use than quills (although the evidence points to Emily still struggling with them)—and much cheaper—nibs in holders grew in use after the penny post made correspondence an ordinary part of most Victorians’ days. Charlotte may have also used a pen of gutta-percha, a type of latex made of tree sap, since nibs for one were also in her desk.27
Writers of the time liked to imagine pens as having lives of their own—thinking, dreaming, and talking—while sitting expectantly in desks among their cohorts, seals, paper, and ink. Stories gave them a chatty agency, like the anonymous Genuine and Most Surprizing Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill and “The Adventures of a Pen,” by one J. Hunt. The latter pen gets passed around from writer to writer, most of them frivolous and less honest than the pen himself. He rubs shoulders in a sailor’s pocket with a pocket dagger, a comb, and a snuff box, and at one point a “celebrated Beau” uses him to “make rebuses for the ladies.” When he can’t bear to be used to write immoral words, the pen finds his ink freezing up with horror in his nib.28
Charlotte didn’t always use a pen (of any sort) or her writing slope when composing her novels. For early drafts, she used pencils, like the stubby ones cut to points with a knife found in her various boxes, including her desk. (One, with “Pitman’s Phonographic Pencil” printed on it, advertises a form of shorthand created by Isaac Pitman, who traveled to nearby York and Leeds and elsewhere to promote phonography in the 1840s.) With such pencils, she wrote on scraps of paper in her miniature hand, placed “against a piece of board, such as is used in binding books, for a desk,” according to Gaskell, who saw some of Charlotte’s early drafts. This way, she could position the paper near her face, a necessary position because of her shortsightedness (although she did, eventually, wear spectacles, one pair still stored in her desk). Harriet Martineau made a similar observation, remarking that Charlotte’s first drafts were penciled into “little square paper books, held close to her eyes.” Emily may have used a similar method, which would explain the ripped-off cover of a hardbound book with pencil doodles of men’s and women’s faces found in her desk—a perfect hard surface for scribbling in odd places. For Charlotte, this was sometimes in bed. With her early novels, she occasionally worked late at night when insomnia struck, so the extra portability of these boards and pencils—no need for an ink bottle, for instance—meant that another writing space could be made: lying down, tucked in. Using an ink pen and her slope, she then made a neat, clean copy, to be posted out to publishers. In her desk she stored a hand-ruled sheet of paper, likely put behind the pages of her fair copy, helping to keep her lines of text perfectly straight.29
Very little had, in fact, changed since Charlotte snipped out and stitched that miniature magazine long ago. The fundamentals of production since the early days of Gondal and Angria remained in place. Here again the sisters collaborated, with Charlotte and Emily still deploying a secret script on small sheets or paper booklets. All three altered their identities (and genders), and they even sent off the manuscripts in brown parcel wrapping, of the same sort used to bind their little books. Instead of the address being concealed inside, now it went exposed, written out for the postman to act on. Granted, the three now coveted an audience larger than the family. Yet this readership within the family remained an essential component; these were joint projects among the “Bell brothers.”
During the long labor of reaching this expanded circle of readers, the three works were initially linked up, despite their great differences. In April 1846, Charlotte wrote to Aylott and Jones, informing them that the Bells were completing three works of fiction, and asking if they were interested in them. They were not. Charlotte, continuing to act as secretary for all three, wrote to Henry Colburn, a prominent London publisher, requesting “permission to send for your inspection” their manuscripts. This was the beginning of July, so the fair copies of all three works must have been freshly written out and polished by midsummer. At this point, Charlotte proposed to Colburn that the works be published together, even calling them a “M.S. of a work of fiction in 3 vols.” She knew that the three-volume format, or the “three-decker,” was the easiest to sell, and the tales they had written were each far shorter than three volumes. The three-decker had become popular largely because subscription lending libraries had so much power in dictating what was published. While the bulkiness of the Victorian novel emerged in part due to a widely held idea that novels ought to represent a comprehensive social world, with multiple plots and characters, a form at which Dickens especially excelled, the three-volume structure became standard because it made more money for the lending libraries. Such “libraries,” actually lucrative businesses, were so widely patronized that they had a tremendous influence on fiction. They especially liked three-volume novels, since three subscribers could be lent different parts of a novel at once, and pressured publishers into limiting their purchase of novels of other lengths. While Charlotte tried to get around this by presenting the Brontë novels as fit to be published together, Emily must have miscalculated the length of Wuthering Heights, which grew to be fit for two volumes, although never for three.
Having no luck with Colburn, the works were “perseveringly obtruded upon various publishers for the space of a year and a half,” Charlotte s
aid, their fate repeatedly “an ignominious and abrupt dismissal.” At some point Charlotte began going at it alone, with The Professor plodding “its weary way around London” on its own. Either because of thriftiness, or because the “chill of despair” at times invaded her heart, Charlotte reused the brown parcel that wrapped the manuscript, just scoring out the address of the publisher who rejected it and writing the new one underneath. By the time it reached Smith, Elder and Co., who would eventually publish all of her novels, the paper cover had the directions of three or four other publishing houses crossed out, which didn’t make the new addressee optimistic about its contents.30
As the three monitored the comings and goings of these parcels, trailing hopes and disappointments, they watched their father lose his sight to cataracts, a terrible thing for the still-vigorous old man. Advised to try surgery, they found a doctor in Manchester who had become known for his high rate of success with this type of eye operation. Charlotte went there with Patrick in August, and on the day of his surgery she received another rejection of The Professor, at their lodgings on Oxford Road, probably forwarded by Emily and Anne from Haworth. Instead of despairing, she did the opposite, immediately starting to write Jane Eyre. She must have brought her desk with her to Manchester, well stocked with paper scraps, paper booklets, a board, and pencils. More than any of her other novels, this one surged unfiltered out of her imagination, a spontaneous overflow of passion. While her father recovered, she spent the five weeks in Manchester drafting the first few chapters about the angry, abused orphan.
When Charlotte and Patrick returned to Haworth at the end of September, his sight was slowly coming back and she still had the story streaming out of her. She gave herself up to it just like she had with the Angrian adventures. “I’m just going to write because I cannot help it,” she had written years before, but this feeling of helplessness in the face of compulsive creativity could have been written during the early autumn of composing Jane Eyre. Once Jane meets Rochester, “on she went,” Harriet Martineau tells us, from Charlotte’s spoken account, “writing incessantly for three weeks; by which time she had carried her heroine away from Thornfield.” If this was literally true, Charlotte wrote seventeen chapters, some three hundred pages, in three weeks. When she was in such a state, she would wake up after a night’s sleep, and the “progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, in distinct vision,” Gaskell recounts. She became possessed, the characters and events in the novel more present than the real life happening around her.31