Making the Rounds

[In] dreary expectation of finding two hard hopeless lines… instead he took out of the envelope a letter of two pages. He read it trembling. It declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously… that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly-expressed acceptance would have done.

—Charlotte Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” 1850¹

After I returned to the States, I took refuge in New York for the summer. Barb helped me get an internship with a book publisher and I took to it immediately—reading fledgling books out of the slush pile, sitting in on editorial meetings, even ferrying paperwork back and forth from production to marketing was thrilling. It was exciting to see how the literary sausage got made. The editors I worked for had eclectic tastes in projects, and I got to meet their authors and help with their book parties, draft cover copy, and make art logs. I loved hunting for new projects they’d like in the week’s submissions, reading their backlists, and hearing what it was like to spend days between the pages of books nobody has read yet.

I lived with my aunt and uncle in White Plains, took the Metro-North train into Grand Central, and walked up Madison Avenue every day. I ate lunch next to a slab of the Berlin Wall where the Stork Club used to stand and passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Waldorf Astoria on my way home. I remember the first time I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge; I made myself go all the way to the middle, despite wearing flip-flops, before I turned around to take in the view. What can you say about the skyline up close that hasn’t been said? It’s dizzying and glittering and somehow still makes me think of the tiny colonial seaport that used to cluster at the water’s edge. And then I turned to the left and saw the Statue of Liberty, who never fails to put a lump in my throat. The city made my still-painful breakup seem like an even better idea than it had been at the time. How could I ever have settled for only one year here?

I promptly developed a crush on a fellow intern named Bianca, a New York native who knew every bartender from the Upper West Side to the East Village. We wheedled garish happy-hour margaritas out of T.G.I. Fridays waiters, charmed bouncers into waving us in without checking ID, sipped gin and tonics at hookah bars in Alphabet City, and stumbled around laughing uproariously until the next day, when we’d commiserate over our hangovers via Gchat and hope our bosses couldn’t smell alcohol through our pores. Bianca made me feel like I wasn’t some socially remedial weirdo. I could be cool, casual, and vivacious too—liberated from my usual prison of self-consciousness, capable of anything. I would try to carry some of that confidence with me when I returned to Ithaca in the fall. Thanks to that internship, my post-graduation plan had gone from a vague notion of freelancing somewhere to “become New York publishing editorial prodigy.”

I finished my final semester of college, spent a month publishing theater reviews in the local papers, and had a fling with a townie ten years my senior. I’d gone to Ithaca to become a musical theater ingenue and found myself a writer embarking on my own odyssey. I graduated with a folder of clips, a fairly high-profile editorial internship under my belt, and a desire to take my place as a star in the publishing firmament. It did not precisely unfold as I would have liked. The course of true love, the literal and the literary, never did run smooth.

COUNTER to the common legend that the Brontë sisters just so happened to be writing poems in 1845 in a magical confluence of chance and fate that catapulted them to stardom, Charlotte had been probing at the corners of a potential literary career for years (as had Branwell). In 1836 she sent some poems to the poet Robert Southey, who sent back an infuriating letter condescendingly explaining that women shouldn’t worry about being literary, for some man would be along to marry them soon enough:

You… so ardently desire “to be for ever known” as a poetess.…

The daydreams in [which] you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind.… Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation.2

This would not be the first time Charlotte heard such attitudes expressed—her own father’s novel, The Maid of Killarny, contained similar sentiments. Charlotte replied to Southey so graciously I have to wonder if she was actually making fun of him:

I must thank you for the kind & wise advice you have condescended to give me. I had not ventured to hope for such a reply; so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit.… At the first perusal of your letter I felt only shame, and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody;—I felt a painful heat rise to my face, when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but which now was only a source of confusion; but, after I thought a little and read it again and again, the prospect seemed to clear. You do not forbid me to write; you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit. You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures; of writing for the love of fame; for the selfish excitement of emulation.³

Every time I read Southey’s letter I get livid. Firstly, the arrogance of some poet whose major contribution to literature was “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” making the author of Jane Eyre feel bad about writing poetry makes me ill. Secondly, why is she so polite? Then I started reading her response differently. Where at first I thought I heard sincerity in each line, I enjoy imagining every word dripping with sarcasm.

She wrote back once more to assure him her ambition was “cured.” He replied again to urge her to “take care of over-excitement & endeavor to keep a quiet mind.”4 What could be less useful to a writer than a quiet mind?

So, did she believe him? Charlotte did keep Southey’s letters and write “to be kept for ever” on the outside. But she also worked on at least five novels in the next ten years. In each one she spent time lambasting pompous blowhards who devalue the abilities of women as critical thinkers. She became a world-famous author and chose not to marry, despite several offers, until after she was well on her way to being “for ever known” so. She claimed the right for herself and her sisters to earn a living through their talents. She helped make a world where women can have a writing career and a respectable marriage. Maybe she thought of Southey the way I think of the classmate who read an autobiographical comic I had invested ink, tears, and months into and callously advised me to “stick to prose.” I tell my students that story every year now, to motivate them to be thoughtful, constructive, and empathetic in their feedback with one another.

Maybe Charlotte had seen how Branwell’s more confrontational tactics had failed and decided to try to catch literary flies with prosaic honey instead. His repeated letters to Blackwoods may have begun with humble compliments for the poetry of the Ettrick Shepherd, but by 1837 Branwell had become demanding and petulant. He had more success in reaching Hartley Coleridge, essayist, poet, and son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1840, Charlotte sent Coleridge a few chapters of her own novel in progress, Ashworth. It was a fairly Jane Austen–like tale of a French opera singer and her illegitimate daughter, presaging Jane Eyre’s Celine Varens and Adele. Coleridge told Charlotte her novel was unlikely to find a publisher. She wrote him a spectacularly strange letter back, in which she thanked him for writing and added that she was glad he couldn’t tell if she were male or female:

As to my handwriting, or the ladylike tricks you mention in my style and imagery—you must not draw any conclusion from those—Several young gentlemen curl their hair and wear corsets—Richardson and Rousseau—often write exactly like old women—and Bulwer and Cooper and Dickens and Warren like boarding-school misses. Seriously Sir, I am very much obliged to you for your kind and candid letter.5

Charlotte’s voice in her letters is great—hearing it, I realize there is at least as much of Charlotte in Mr. Rochester as there is in Jane; they have the same ruthless wit and teasing sensibility. And for a twenty-four-year-old writer who’d never published anything she or her brother hadn’t stitched together with their own hands, she has a lot of moxie running down Dickens and Rousseau! I imagine it was eye-opening for Charlotte to see that Miss Brontë, clergyman’s daughter, got a sexist, dream-squashing reply from Southey, while the ambiguous “CT” received feedback on the quality of her writing and not her future family obligations. This version of the Brontës’ literary beginning is not terribly exciting—it’s practical. Charlotte consulted experts, learned to navigate rejection, built her confidence back up, revised her work, and then finally took the plunge: she began sending her work out to editors to solicit their opinions. It’s how most writers get started. If they’re lucky.

The myth she cultivated in place of this pragmatic reality sounds straight out of a legend: Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, Helen being born with a ship-launching face, Atalanta scooping up a golden apple without breaking stride.

In the autumn of 1845, the story goes, Charlotte discovered a notebook of Emily’s poetry, and was struck by how much progress Emily had made since their evenings of reading to one another in the dining room as teenagers. She wondered if they could possibly publish them.^* This prompted Anne to proffer up some poems as well, and Charlotte added some verses of her own to complete the collection. And suddenly, they were writers! Novels just happened to follow! With their names on them! Could have happened to anyone! In the forewords to reissued editions of her sisters’ novels, Charlotte implied that they had occasionally thought of being authors as children but never expected anyone would want to read their work. I love Charlotte Brontë, but she was lying through her teeth. Charlotte had been soliciting feedback on her writing for six years by the time she “stumbled across” the work that would become their debut publication! This spun-sugar origin story was designed to do two things: relieve the Brontës from the “unwomanly” stigma of ambition, and conceal the very deliberate effort they put into developing their skills.

It wasn’t ladylike to want to be “for ever known,” so the sisters decided to use pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, and Acton, respectively) that would protect their identities and keep them from being dismissed as “women poets.” They kept their endeavor secret from their father, their brother, servants, and everyone else in the village. Only the paper sellers in Haworth and nearby Keighley found the volume and frequency of their purchases suspicious, though it seems impossible that neither Patrick, nor Branwell, nor any of the Brontës’ neighbors saw them correcting proofs or mailing large stacks of paper.

Charlotte undertook the role of literary agent for herself and her sisters, sending the little bundle of poems from publisher to publisher and coping with the disinterest and rejection that followed. Because of the secrecy Charlotte had promised Emily, there aren’t any archives detailing this process, aside from the occasional submission or rejection letter. How I wish she had kept a journal, as she did at Roe Head!

Finally, Aylott & Jones accepted Charlotte’s request to publish the work at the authors’ expense. Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, was paid for with 36 pounds, 10 shillings of Aunt Branwell’s legacy. The first copies arrived on the Brontës’ doorstep in May of 1846. Charlotte would come to look back on the earnest volumes with chagrin, and not just because they were a commercial failure. She thought the only verses worth reading were Emily’s, dismissing Anne’s as pleasant enough but lacking originality; Charlotte had never returned to poetry after leaving Brussels, so she felt like her contributions to Poems failed to reflect her maturation as a writer. Charlotte circulated review copies to a number of publications; W. A. Butler of Dublin University Magazine was one of the few who obliged with a review, saying, mildly, “Their verses are full of unobtrusive feeling; and their tone of thought seems unaffected and sincere,” while also speculating whether there were really three Bells, as opposed to one prolific individual.6

Though Poems received a handful of other positive notices, only two copies were ever actually sold—one of the happy purchasers wrote to the Bells and asked for their autograph; in his estate, years later, was found the unique scrap of paper with the signatures of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell upon it. Today, you can buy a postcard facsimile at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and hang it by your desk and imagine you had the foresight to ask for it.

I know I said that I’d been touched by everything the Brontë sisters wrote in some way, but their poetry leaves me cold. Reading it feels like wading through knee-deep wet sand, though the nature descriptions are lovely. The restrained introspection of Emily Dickinson or the heat of Pablo Neruda are more my speed. The Brontë poetry lacks the sense of human immediacy that pervades their prose, and it’s beset by the formal Victorian Englishness their novels are so notable for transcending. The acidic critic of The Literary Gazette who reviewed Poems called it “the kind of poetry which is not endured by gods, men, or bookstalls.”⁷ I hate to agree with any criticism formed in prudishness over what is “appropriate” in literature, but I think the broader success of the Brontës’ narrative efforts speaks for itself. Once they escaped the stricture of verse, their careers took off.

WHILE Poems was still in production, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were hard at work on novels. It may have been Emily’s and Anne’s first efforts at writing longer prose, but Charlotte had already set aside at least two novella drafts. Their plan was to each include a contribution to a three-volume novel. Charlotte sent The Professor, based on her time in Brussels, along with Wuthering Heights, Emily’s Gothic tale of doomed love and passion run riot, and Agnes Grey, Anne’s story of a quietly moral governess, off to seek their fortunes. Charlotte was aware of The Professor’s flaws—its overly sarcastic protagonist and emotionally distant narrative—and already planned to develop elements of her juvenile Zamorna stories into a more marketable work if this first effort didn’t pan out. I’m not a big fan of The Professor. Nobody in it feels particularly real or compelling, and the narrator is terribly moody. It has yet to provoke any significant life alterations for me, but that may be just an issue of timing.

The novels were considered (and rejected) separately by various editors, rather than as a unit, possibly because Wuthering Heights was already double its intended length. After sending them out a fifth time, in August of 1846, Charlotte accompanied Patrick Brontë to Manchester for a cataract operation. As she attended him during his recovery, she began Jane Eyre.

Finally, in July of 1847, an unscrupulous publisher named T. C. Newby agreed to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. The terms were not very favorable—the authors were to advance the sum of £50 and be repaid from the novels’ profits.

Discouraged but persistent, Charlotte crossed out the address of the previous publisher, wrote “Smith, Elder & Co.” on the battered wrapping of The Professor, and gave it another go.

William Smith Williams, the head reader at Smith, Elder & Co., didn’t care for The Professor, but he recognized the strength of its author. Along with the publisher, George Smith, he wrote Charlotte such a thoughtful and well-considered rejection letter that she wrote back, as Currer Bell, to thank them. She shrewdly suggested that The Professor might make up for its “want of varied interest” if it were “speedily followed up by another work from the same pen,” mentioning another novel in three volumes that was nearly finished.8 They accepted the new work (soon to be for ever known as Jane Eyre) two weeks later. Charlotte’s elation at their acceptance was brief, as they also enclosed several suggestions for further revision (evidently they thought parts of the opening at Lowood too shocking for a contemporary audience). She promptly rejected their proposed revisions: “Perhaps too the first part of ‘Jane Eyre’ may suit the public taste better than you anticipate—for it is true and Truth has a severe charm of its own. Had I told all the truth, I might indeed have made it far more exquisitely painful.”⁹

They must have decided to trust Currer Bell’s instincts, because English literary society was introduced to Jane, Mr. Rochester, and the rest on October 19, 1847. Critics had varying responses—“The whole is unnatural, and only critically interesting,” wrote The Spectator. “No woman could have penned ‘The Autobiography of Jane Eyre.’… The apt, eloquent, elegant, and yet easy mode by which the writer engages you, is something altogether out of the common way,” said The Era. My personal favorite is from Atlas: “It is a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat, and to fill the eyes with tears.… The action of the tale is sometimes unnatural—the passion is always true.”10

William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, loved it, writing to Williams,

I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy.… Some of the love passages made me cry—to the astonishment of John who came in with the coals. St. John the Missionary is a failure I think but a good failure there are parts excellent I don’t know why I tell you this but that I have been exceedingly moved & pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a womans writing, but whose?¹¹

The success of Jane Eyre laid the groundwork for Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey when they were released a few months later, and eventually the sisters began receiving the occasional royalty check for their literary debuts. Perhaps even more important than the financial support, Charlotte had found a lifeline to the outside world in the form of letters and loaned books from her publishers. Though at first she was brisk and professional with Williams and Smith behind the mask of Currer Bell, gradually she became friendly, warming enough to write sarcastic letters about critics and reviews she found irritating and new novels she appreciated.

What’s most inspiring to me about this part of the Brontë story is how deliberate their success was. I know she wanted us all to believe it was an accident, but Charlotte was an involved businesswoman—she gave printers and editors precise specifications for what sort of paper to use, how to spend their budget on distribution, and later on, what could and could not be reprinted. Having spent years making her own tiny bound books, it’s natural she had strong opinions, though often tempered with a self-deprecating “… or whatever you think best.” Even her decision to self-publish their volume of poetry shows moxie.

I’ve started to view Poems as more of a test balloon than a real first effort. It was material they already had so it didn’t need more time for writing or revision; it gave them a chance to learn the publishing ropes; and following it promptly with novels gave critics and journalists a narrative to deploy in their coverage of the mysterious Bells. Were they three women? Were they one man? How could a man write women so well? How could three women be so coarse?

Charlotte was a hardy soul. After she became successful, her letters to her publishers included gems like, “It would take a great deal to crush me,” in response to some critical notices, and, “The hard-wrung praise extorted reluctantly from a foe is the most precious praise of all—you are sure that this, at least, has no admixture of flattery,” in response to some grudging admiration.12 I have both of these quotes pinned up by my desk, and I look at them often.

My earnest efforts to join the editorial side of publishing might have been the initial steps I needed to take in order to find my feet as a writer. Writing may still be “that single absorbing exquisite gratification,” as Charlotte wrote to Southey, but logistically, it’s intimidating. It’s a different world for writers now; we are often told to be happy with “exposure” for our essays and that we provide “content,” rather than something so essential as storytelling. It would have required more self-assurance than I possessed (not to mention a source of independent wealth and something to say) to label myself a writer straight out of college. It was easier to believe myself an editor, eager to support the work of others, until I really found something of my own.