THIRTEEN

Conquering the Big Babylon

1849–51

Charlotte had caught a cold at the coast that she couldn’t shake off, and that, with the accompaniment of pains between her shoulders, of course filled her with dread, though she strove to hide any signs of ill-health from her father; “his anxiety harasses me inexpressibly.” Looking back over the last year, with her siblings dying one after another in autumn, winter and spring, Charlotte could hardly have expected to survive them long. The infectious nature of consumption was not understood for another twenty years, with the development of germ theory, but the rapid decline of her more robust sister Emily, who had seemed to have “spirit…strong enough to bear her to fulness of years,” meant Charlotte felt the spectre of sudden decline and death hanging over her ever after.

Ellen Nussey wanted to come and stay at Haworth, but Charlotte turned down the offer, on the harsh principle of needing to endure the worst as soon as possible. Williams too, her most generously sympathetic friend and the recipient of her most heartbreaking letters, was moved by Charlotte’s predicament to suggest she should have a companion come to live with her.^*1 She declined this also, there being “two persons whom it would not suit”: primarily the young person condemned to share such a melancholy and uneventful existence, “a church and stony churchyard for her prospect—the dead silence of a village parsonage…a grave, silent spinster for her companion. I should not like to see youth thus immured.” The other person whom the arrangement would not suit was of course Patrick Brontë. There was no change there, after the disastrous winnowing of his family; no adjustment to his habits of retirement and solitary meals, and no better tolerance of intrusions. The older he got, the more entirely Charlotte considered his wishes, however much against her own interests they were. A young female companion coming to live at the Parsonage in 1849 might indeed have been a real comfort to her.

Sitting in a house so silent that the tick of the clock on the landing was the only sign of life, Charlotte wrote to Williams that she knew work was the thing to sustain her: “Lonely as I am—how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career—perseverance to plead through two long, weary years with publishers till they admitted me?”

hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give—For society—long seclusion has in great measure unfitted me—I doubt whether I should enjoy it if I might have it. Sometimes I think I should, and I thirst for it—but at other times I doubt my capability of pleasing or deriving pleasure. The prisoner in solitary confinement—the toad in the block of marble—all in time shape themselves to their lot.

In the long days alone Charlotte returned to the manuscript of “Hollow’s Mill,” which she had struggled to continue writing the previous year and abandoned when Anne was dying. But what had started life as a conscious attempt at a realistic “condition of England” novel, with strong dramatisations of social and religious questions and suppression of too much “romance” in the love stories, had been overtaken by events. Charlotte’s heart was no longer in it, except that there was a melancholy pleasure in making her dead sister Emily the model for the novel’s heroine, Shirley Keeldar, and perhaps putting herself (combined with aspects of Anne) into the character of Caroline Helstone.^*2 Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell that Shirley Keeldar was an attempt to depict “what Emily Brontë would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity”—a fantasy version of her sister, in other words. In August she wrote to Williams telling him that she was changing the name of the book to that of the character who had turned out to be “the most prominent and peculiar.”

Rich, clever, carefree Shirley is a visionary, a philosopher, but passive and contemplative, for all her talk of wanting to do things in the world. She spends hours on the heath, lying in heather and staring at the sky, or at windows, looking out at stars; a poet in thought, but one who doesn’t write. Charlotte gave her such a self-contented and philosophical disposition that the character ran the risk of seeming incredible (however true a reflection of Emily Brontë’s inner calm it might have been): her prospective marriage to Louis Moore at the end of the story seems almost irrelevant to her happiness, as well as unlikely.

Shirley needs her counterpart, suffering and sensitive Caroline Helstone, to earth her, and Caroline’s inactivity and repression are the most dynamic things in the book. Caroline is a creature of silences, concealing secret eloquence, a commentator who rarely gets to comment. One of her most rabble-rousing internal monologues culminates in something like a battle-cry: “Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to sour old maids,—envious, backbiting, wretched, because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied.” But all this is thought, not uttered, and melts seamlessly into the narrator’s own commentary.

“What on earth is the matter with you?” Helstone asks his niece, anticipating Freud’s question “What do women want?” by some fifty years. Caroline tells him quite explicitly that she wants occupation— “I feel weaker than formerly. I believe I should have more to do”—but her uncle chooses to hear this as a typical example of female irrationality, and the course of action he proposes is to buy her a new frock. This is mirrored in a scene where the workman Joe Scott questions what interest Shirley can possibly have in the newspapers, and when she replies, “I read the leading articles, Joe, and the foreign intelligence, and I look over the market prices: in short, I read just what gentlemen read,” he looks at her “as if he thought this talk was like the chattering of a pie.”

Florence Nightingale, who had been impressed by the Bells’ Poems and by Jane Eyre,^*3 read Currer Bell’s new novel as she was about to set off to study at the Institution of Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in 1850, following a long and painful struggle with her family for permission to find “necessary occupation.” The message of both Jane Eyre and Shirley was reflected in her own first publication the following year, in which she made a passionate case for action: “what are they to do with that thirst for action, useful action, which every woman feels who is not diseased in mind or body? God planted it there.” Shirley Keeldar was, like her, privileged, scholarly, strong-willed, and, like her, adopted a masculine outlook.^*4 Currer Bell’s latest heroine may have spoken even more powerfully to Nightingale than the first, and her words “may well have been uppermost in Florence’s mind” as the young deaconess set out on the career that would lead her, within four years, to hospitals at Scutari and in the Crimea.

Contrary to plan, Charlotte couldn’t keep her Brussels experience out of the mix. It was still on her mind—perhaps more painfully than ever once bitterness and humiliation had replaced hope and waiting—and kept poking through into the text. Charlotte recast the rivalrous Crimsworth brothers of The Professor (with their long Angrian lineage) as Belgian immigrants in Yorkshire; Robert and Louis Gérard Moore—one of them a hard-nosed man of business, the other a sensitive scholar—along with their sister Hortense, retain many Continental habits and mannerisms. Robert likes to recite some of the poems that Monsieur Heger introduced to Charlotte back in 1842–3, while Louis, Shirley’s former tutor and now her not-very-secret admirer, reminisces about her brilliance as a student and recites, incredibly enough from memory, a devoir she once wrote for him on the subject of female genius. “[W]hat were the faults of that devoir?” Shirley asks, looking at all her tutor’s markings over her work. “What else did they denote?” “No matter now,” Louis replies meaningfully. Like Heger’s animated commentary on Charlotte’s essays, his marks obviously denote excitement, engagement and intellectual affinity, signs that Louis Moore sees retrospectively as evidence of love.

But more problematically, the novel bore the burden of Charlotte’s agony of bereavement. When she returned to the manuscript after the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne, it was to the chapter that opens the third volume, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” in which Caroline Helstone falls victim to an illness that is both a physical and a mental fever, a collapse in the face of sorrow. Her sense of imminent death makes her wonder what the departed soul will feel, if there is any hope of communication between the dead and the living, perhaps “electrical” influences in the atmosphere that can play “over our nerves like fingers on stringed instruments, and call forth now a sweet note, and now a wail.” Charlotte’s own wish to be haunted is clear, as are her fears, intensified so many fold by absolute severance from her sisters and brother:

Where is the other world? In what will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me?…Great Spirit! in whose goodness I confide; whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me—oh! give me FAITH!”

In the novel, the heroine survives this crisis with the discovery that her nurse, Mrs. Pryor, is her mother, long thought dead, and the scene ends in an exhausted and emotional silence as parent embraces child. But there was no such return and no such comfort for Charlotte.

—

ALMOST TWO YEARS AFTER Jane Eyre’s first publication, criticism of it was still appearing, and Charlotte still felt defensive about it. In August 1849 a review in the North British Review followed the by now common presumption that the “Bells” were one and the same, and concluded that Currer Bell, if a woman, “must be a woman pretty nearly unsexed.” Charlotte deeply resented the implied double standard, which it had been her objective to circumvent: “To such critics I would say—‘to you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’ ”

Worse than any remarks about her own work, though, were denigrations of her sisters’: the reviewer said he could not finish Wuthering Heights, he found it so disgusting, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not much better, with scenes of “naked vice” that he refused to believe possible among the gentry. Such lashing rebukes were “scarce supportable”; Charlotte was glad Emily and Anne weren’t alive to read them, but her anger on their behalf grew.

In the long months of reclusion, Charlotte felt she had been insufficiently vigilant of her own and her sisters’ reputations, and a notice in The Quarterly Review from December 1848, which had been perceived through the fog of Emily’s death, now seemed to require an answer urgently. In a long article, which first heaped praise on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the anonymous reviewer (Elizabeth Rigby, the friend with whom J. G. Lockhart had been exchanging gossip about the Bells) had lambasted Currer Bell for his vulgarity and, while admitting in passing many virtues of pace, style and feeling in the book, maintained a harsh and sarcastic attack on the debut novelist.

Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end…the impression she leaves on our mind is that of a decidedly vulgar-minded woman—one whom we should not care for as an acquaintance, whom we should not seek as a friend, whom we should not desire for a relation, and whom we should scrupulously avoid for a governess.

Jane Eyre was a d angerous, “anti-Christian” book:

There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment—there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence—there is that pervading tone of ungodly discontent which is at once the most prominent and the most subtle evil which the law and the pulpit, which all civilized society in fact has at the present day to contend with. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

However it was the passages that expressed disgust at Ellis Bell’s novel—“too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers”—that roused Charlotte to respond. Her anger on behalf of Emily was perfectly justified, but the nine-month delay in answering was not, nor was her idea—to address The Quarterly in a preface to her new book—a good one. The “Word to The Quarterly” that she drafted had an uncomfortably flippant tone, and targeted the most minor points raised, such as whether Currer Bell had an adequate knowledge of ladies’ fashion in the 1820s, which had convinced Rigby that the author of Jane Eyre was a man.

Smith and Williams did not like the piece at all and asked Charlotte to change it for something that would engage the public’s sympathies rather than stir up an image of a disgruntled carper. They were much more aware than she of her fame, and how such a display could damage her reputation, things for which Charlotte cared little at this stage. Smith believed that a preface that alluded to her personal circumstances and the deaths of Ellis and Acton Bell might provide a useful context to Shirley, but Charlotte dismissed such an idea severely. “What we deeply feel is our own—we must keep it to ourselves,” she told Williams. “Ellis and Acton Bell were, for me, Emily and Anne; my sisters—to me intimately near, tenderly dear—to the public they were nothing—beings speculated upon, misunderstood, misrepresented. If I live, the hour may come when the spirit will move me to speak of them, but it is not come yet.” In the meantime, Shirley went into print in October with no preface at all.

Elizabeth Rigby was hardly wrong in noticing Jane Eyre’s revolutionary bent, however much Charlotte remained in denial about it. When the second edition of Jane Eyre appeared early in 1848 (just as revolution was breaking out in France, Germany and Italy), a reviewer in the ultra-respectable Christian Remembrancer had accused the book of “moral Jacobinism” on every page. “Never was there a better hater,” the author said of the novel’s angry heroine; “ ‘Unjust, unjust,’ is the burden of every reflection upon the things and powers that be. All virtue is but well masked vice, all religious profession and conduct is but the whitening of the sepulchre.” It is easy to see how a book like Jane Eyre could strike readers as all the more subversive because of its surface conventionality. “To say that Jane Eyre is positively immoral or antichristian, would be to do its writer an injustice,” the Remembrancer concluded. “Still it wears a questionable aspect.”

Such interpretations made Charlotte very uncomfortable. As with her initial response to the 1848 revolutions, she seemed to regret exposing the warmth of her political sympathies and feared seeing her principles put too literally into action. She was very pleased with a review of Jane Eyre in the October 1848 edition of Revue des deux mondes, written by the Anglophile, anti-socialist journalist Eugène Forçade, who praised the Anglo-Saxon spirit of the book, “masculine, inured to suffering and hardship,” and felt that it spoke for itself, without having explicitly to call down “fiery judgment on society in a drama in which society nevertheless plays more or less the cruel and tyrannical role assigned to fate in the tragedies of antiquity.” For him, the novel was an interesting glimpse back at “the old order,” from the perspective of the fast-evolving nations of the Continent. It may have been a congenial order for many men, he said, but not for women, whom he compared as a class to the disaffected bourgeoisie: “they have not the same means of winning a place in the sun.”

Among the middle classes especially, how many girls belonging to the junior branch of the family, must decline through poverty to dependence and destitution! How often must one find, especially among these Englishwomen, that inner conflict, that fatality arising from their situation, so cruelly felt by our needy middle classes, and which grows out of a disharmony between birth, education and fortune.

Quite how he, or Currer Bell, felt that these insights would bolster “the old order” is hard to imagine.

—

CHARLOTTE HAD SAID back in July 1849 that, although she felt she might have lost any ability to enjoy society again, she did sometimes crave it, and a change of scene. Smith and Williams were keen to encourage her to come to London and engage with other writers; they understood how useful it might be to her critical reception as much as to her own well-being to emerge now and then from her Yorkshire fastness. Charlotte had no desire to go to parties and be lionised—in fact the idea filled her with revulsion—but being able to meet “some of the truly great literary characters” of the day, Thackeray, Dickens, Harriet Martineau, tempted her strongly. “However this is not to be yet—I cannot sacrifice my incognito—And let me be content with seclusion—it has its advantages. In general indeed I am tranquil—it is only now and then that a struggle disturbs me—that I wish for a wider world than Haworth.” Her isolation was problematic artistically, though, as she was aware on completion of Shirley. Until she heard from Williams that he liked the book, she had no confidence in it at all, not having been able to share it with her sisters, or with anybody.

Sometimes the gloom of home simply overwhelmed her, as on a day in September 1849 when both Tabby and Martha were ill, Tabby plagued with lameness again and Martha with an “internal inflammation” that Patrick Brontë unhelpfully opined might be life-threatening. Just as he was saying this, Charlotte heard Tabby call from the kitchen and rushed in to find the old servant collapsed on the floor with her head under the grate. Charlotte, who had a headache and felt sick herself, “fairly broke down for ten minutes—sat & cried like a fool,” as she told Ellen.

The publication of Shirley also left her very vulnerable, not just from some of the reviews, which she knew she took too much to heart (“Were my Sisters now alive they and I would laugh over this notice,” she told Williams of one slightly bad one), but from the frenzy of interest locally in the identity of Currer Bell, hugely provoked by the appearance of a book that was all about the West Riding, albeit thirty years in the past. Charlotte already suspected that her post was being opened on purpose in Keighley, and that her retirement was resented there. “[T]he gossiping inquisitiveness of small towns is rife…they are sadly puzzled to guess why I never visit, encourage no overtures to acquaintance, and always stay at home.” A visit to Ellen at Brookroyd that autumn alerted her, rather late in the day, to the fact that Jane Eyre “has been read all over the district,” and she was aware of people treating her differently. This was perturbing, as it meant she was losing her anonymity: “I met sometimes with new deference, with augmented kindness—old schoolfellows and old teachers too, greeted me with generous warmth—and again—ecclesiastical brows lowered thunder on me [because of the depiction of Carus Wilson in Jane Eyre]. When I confronted one or two large-made priests I longed for the battle to come on.”

To the disappointment of no longer being able to “walk invisible” was added the annoyance of Currer Bell’s gender always being a matter of concern to readers and critics. “Why can [the Press] not be content to take Currer Bell for a man?” she asked James Taylor, the editor at Smith, Elder with whom she had begun to correspond (and who had taken a special interest in Shirley, coming to the Parsonage in September to pick up the manuscript personally). “I imagined—mistakenly it now appears—that ‘Shirley’ bore fewer traces of a female hand than ‘Jane Eyre’: that I have misjudged disappoints me a little—though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.” The most aggravating judgement had come from her former champion, G. H. Lewes, whose review of Shirley in The Edinburgh Review criticised the coarseness of the book, and the inferiority of female creativity in general, concluding (in a reprise of what Robert Southey had said in 1837) that “the grand function of woman…is, and ever must be, Maternity.” Charlotte was so angry that she sent him a single sentence: “I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”

Even if they hadn’t read Jane Eyre, the reviewers all treated Shirley as a woman’s work, and harped annoyingly on speculation about the authoress. Gossip about Currer Bell had spread wide by this date, and from her sofa in the Casa Guidi in Florence Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to thank her friend Mary Russell Mitford for the latest snippet—that Jane Eyre had been written by a governess from Cowan Bridge School: “I certainly don’t think that the qualities, half savage and & half freethinking, expressed in ‘Jane Eyre,’ are likely to suit a model governess,” the poet observed wryly. “Your account falls like dew upon the parched curiosity of some of our friends here, to whom (as mere gossip…) I couldn’t resist the temptation of communicating it. People are so curious…about this particular authorship.”

There was no point struggling too long against this tide, especially when it brought with it very welcome messages such as the one that Smith, Elder forwarded in November from Elizabeth Gaskell, praising Shirley in such generous and sympathetic terms that it brought tears to Charlotte’s eyes. “She said I was not to answer it—but I cannot help doing so,” Charlotte told Williams. “[S]he is a good—she is a great woman—proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble. In Mrs. Gaskell’s nature—it mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity to my Sister Emily—in Miss Martineau’s mind I have always felt the same—though there are wide differences—Both these ladies are above me—certainly far my superiors in attainments and experience—I think I could look up to them if I knew them.” In her reply to Mrs. Gaskell, Currer Bell used the female pronoun without demur.

Eagerness to know such people began to work on Charlotte in a beneficial way. She came to realise, gradually and imperfectly, the effect that her presence on the literary scene had been having ever since the publication of Jane Eyre—its effect on readers, writers and the culture generated between them. That world had its own life and momentum and would go on without her whether she joined it or not, though she began to think it time to assert herself. Just before she fell out with him over his disappointing review of Shirley, Charlotte had confessed to George Henry Lewes that during the previous year she had sometimes ceased “to care about literature and critics and fame” altogether, that she had temporarily “lost sight of whatever was prominent in my thoughts at the first publication of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” “[B]ut now I want these things to come back—vividly—if possible.” Something else was also impelling her to find new distractions—the anniversary of Emily’s death looming, memories of which were revived with intolerable poignancy by the returning season. By the middle of November, she told Williams that she had “almost formed the resolution of coming to London,” and then—nearly as abruptly as her trip to London with Anne in 1848—she was packing her bags and heading for a fortnight’s stay with George Smith and his family in the “big Babylon.”

George Smith was very obviously delighted to be allowed to present Miss Brontë to his friends at last, however modestly she said she wished to be entertained. He had instructed his mother and sisters to treat their guest at their terraced townhouse in Paddington with special care; the first day or two were consequently rather constrained, as the Smiths ran around making sure there were enough candles and fire for their frail-looking visitor. When Mrs. Smith relaxed from this sentinel posture, Charlotte began to like her a great deal. “[K]indness is a potent heart-winner,” Charlotte remarked to Ellen. She liked young Mr. Smith much better than before too, having seen how good a son and brother he was.

The visit was a chance to make better acquaintance with W. S. Williams, although there was still constraint there, by comparison with the freedom of their letters: “[he] too is really most gentlemanly and well-informed—his weak points he certainly has—but these are not seen in society.” The third member of the Smith, Elder team, “the little man,” red-headed, 33-year-old James Taylor, was more difficult to assess. Taylor had a position of some responsibility, overseeing at least forty junior staff, whom he ruled, Charlotte heard, with an iron will. Taylor’s striking resemblance to Branwell might have disturbed Charlotte; her father had noticed it when the young publisher called at the Parsonage in September to pick up the manuscript of Shirley. She found him both attractive and repulsive at once; reminiscent of “the Helstone order of men” for his despotism and rigidity, but with intriguing flashes of sensitivity. “He tries to be very kind and even to express sympathy sometimes,” Charlotte told Ellen, “and he does not manage it—he has a determined, dreadful nose in the midd[l]e of his face which when poked into my countenance cuts into my soul like iron—Still he is horribly intelligent, quick, searching, sagacious—and with a memory of relentless tenacity: to turn to Williams after him or to Smith himself is to turn from granite to easy down or warm fur.”

Smith was keen to treat his guest to some stimulating outings: Charlotte saw Macready, the most famous actor of the day, both in Macbeth and in Othello (though she shocked a dinner party by being insufficiently impressed with him) and went to the National Gallery, where she was delighted with an exhibition of some of the paintings that Turner had bequeathed to the nation. If John Ruskin, whose Modern Painters Charlotte had admired very much, had not been out of the country, Smith would undoubtedly have arranged an introduction to him: Smith was Ruskin’s friend and publisher. Smith had a whole list of people he wished Charlotte to meet: Lady Morgan (author of The Wild Irish Girl), Catherine Gore (one of the fashionable “silver-fork” novelists), Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens. As it was, he tested Miss Brontë’s sociability to a new extreme by inviting two gentlemen to dinner one evening: Dr. John Forbes, with whom Charlotte had been in correspondence during Anne’s last illness, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Smith had forewarned the novelist not to upset Miss Brontë by indicating that he knew she was Currer Bell, but Thackeray couldn’t resist making a remark about his cigar, quoting from Jane Eyre, when the gentlemen rejoined the ladies after dinner. Charlotte was discomposed (not surprisingly, since Rochester’s cigar habit was one of Constantin Heger’s bequests to her novel) and shut down the conversation “in a chilly fashion,” as Smith was sorry to see, but Thackeray apparently went off to his club none the worse for his reprimand, saying, “Boys! I have been dining with ‘Jane Eyre.’ ”

To her father, Charlotte described the great man, whom she knew had been assessing her from a distance all through dinner: “He is a very tall man—above six feet high, with a peculiar face—not handsome—very ugly indeed—generally somewhat satirical and stern in expression, but capable also of a kind look…I should think to have him for a friend than an enemy—for he is a most formidable looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen—all he says is most simple but often cynical, harsh and contradictory.” For all its interest, Charlotte found the evening very taxing, and knew that nerves had made her “painfully stupid” with the man whose works she so admired. She fared much better with an introduction she arranged herself, writing to Harriet Martineau as Currer Bell to ask if she could call. Martineau and her relations waited in suspense to see who would turn up at the appointed hour: “whether a tall moustached man six feet high or an aged female, or a girl, or—altogether a ghost, a hoax or a swindler!” Miss Martineau needed the aid of an ear trumpet, so was hoping that the visitor’s real name was properly announced; she told her cousins they were to shout it distinctly into the horn if not. When a carriage was heard at the door and the bell rung, “in came a neat little woman, a very little sprite of a creature nicely dressed; & with nice tidy bright hair.” Charlotte did reveal her real name, but the Martineaus were sworn to keep it secret, and Charlotte must have been pleased with them and with the frisson her dramatic arrival caused, for she relaxed and was able to talk to them very naturally. “[S]he was so pleasant & so naive, that is to say so innocent and un Londony that we were quite charmed with her,” one of Martineau’s cousins said.

When Charlotte got back to Haworth in the week before Christmas, exhausted, she wrote to Williams—now safely back in his epistolary sphere—that her time in London had furnished her with “ideas, images, pleasant feelings—such as may perhaps cheer many a long winter evening,” but that as soon as the routine of home closed round her again, the whole visit seemed as unreal as a dream. “I think I should scarcely like to live in London,” she told Miss Wooler, “and were I obliged to live there, I should certainly go little into company—especially I should eschew the literary coteries.”

Smith’s generosity and thoughtfulness meant that more such visits occurred, though, and over the next four years Charlotte returned three times to Smith’s home, attended exhibitions, plays, concerts, operas; heard famous preachers and the infamous Cardinal Wiseman; breakfasted with the poet Samuel Rogers; took tea with Miss Martineau; dined with Thackeray. If Smith had hoped that this injection of activity and interest into Miss Brontë’s life would bring her out of her shell, he was wrong—she was and remained very self-conscious in company—but the closer contacts she made, with Elizabeth Gaskell particularly, fed her craving for intelligent discussion and a sympathetic audience.

Gaskell had been intrigued with Miss Brontë’s story—such of it as she could find out—long before they met, which was not until the summer of 1850. In the spring of that year an active but interfering man called James Kay-Shuttleworth, a former physician and Poor Law commissioner who had acquired a title and a castellated mansion called Gawthorpe, in Lancashire, from his wife Lady Janet, drove over to Haworth on a whim to be introduced to the famous Miss Brontë. Charlotte was far from pleased at the intrusion, but Patrick Brontë was strongly impressed by Sir James’s title and confident manner, and urged his daughter to accept the invitation that had been held out to her, to visit the couple at Gawthorpe Hall. Mrs. Gaskell had heard all about their meeting from her friend Lady Janet: it was through this channel that she picked up the first stories about Reverend Brontë’s eccentricities that caused trouble later, in her biography. But in 1850 such anecdotes simply added to the romance around the author of Jane Eyre.

When the two novelists met at the Kay-Shuttleworths’ house by Lake Windermere, Briery Close, in August, Gaskell was immediately impressed by Charlotte’s modesty and retirement, “a little lady in a black silk gown” who worked at her sewing and hardly spoke. “[B]ut I had time for a good look at her,” Gaskell told her correspondent, Catherine Winkworth (who was to become a friend of Charlotte’s herself). “She is, (as she calls herself) undeveloped; thin and more than ½ a head shorter than I, soft brown hair not so dark as mine; eyes (very good and expressive looking straight & open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad and rather overhanging.” This unpromising description was mitigated by Mrs. Gaskell’s tribute to Miss Brontë’s quiet charm and sincerity: “She has a very sweet voice, rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort, admirable and just befitting the occasion. There is nothing overstrained but perfectly simple.”

Mrs. Gaskell was intrigued by the long conversations she had during these three days with Miss Brontë, who told her the story of her life in some detail, including some amusingly narrated set-piece scenes, such as Charlotte going in to tell her father about the publication of Jane Eyre and his response at tea, “Children, Charlotte has been writing a book.” It is notable that most of these anecdotes, clearly encouraged by Mrs. Gaskell’s eager appreciation of every detail, were ones relating to her father, and tended to illustrate the opposition Charlotte had encountered from him all her life. It was rather disloyal as well as confessional to be telling this stranger that “At 19 I should have been thankful for an allowance of 1d a week. I asked my father, but he said What did women want with money.” No wonder, when Gaskell added this information to the garbled tales of parental tyranny she had heard elsewhere, that she produced such a negative portrait of Patrick Brontë in the biography she wrote seven years later. It had been dictated in part by his daughter.

Charlotte may have been encouraged by Elizabeth Gaskell’s interest in her life, and her deeply sympathetic response to the story of her siblings’ deaths from consumption (which Gaskell, incidentally, immediately assumed the emaciated Miss Brontë had also contracted), to consider doing what she had previously refused, and write something biographical about them. The adverse criticism that the works of Ellis and Acton Bell had attracted and the fading of interest in them since their deaths—which the public didn’t know about, of course—hung on Charlotte’s conscience. While she was fêted and rewarded, while she visited celebrities and banked large cheques from her publisher (£500 for the copyright of Shirley), her sisters were forgotten. Having asked George Smith to buy back the rights to Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey from the recalcitrant Newby, Charlotte offered to write a biographical preface to a new edition, in line with what he and Williams had suggested in 1849. In prose of sombre power and beauty, she outlined her family’s remote country upbringing, close sibling bonds and love of their moorland home, their delight in composition and—after Charlotte’s chance discovery of Emily’s poems—their efforts to get the poems, and then their novels, published and read. It made an irresistible narrative.

[Their works] appeared at last. Critics failed to do them justice. The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognised; its import and nature were misunderstood; the identity of its author was misrepresented; it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre. Unjust and grievous error! We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now. Hence, I fear, arose a prejudice against the book.

Emily’s character comes strongly before the reader: proud, uncompromising, distant, stoical. Her death, and that of Anne, were told briefly, but from a depth of personal pain that made this one of the most moving memorials of the age, to two tragic young women whose real names were only just being revealed:

Never in all her life had [Emily] lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of love and awe. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.

“An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world,” Charlotte said, brilliantly fulfilling that role herself in this poignant tribute to doomed and unrecognised genius. Of Anne, whose personality was, as in life, eclipsed by the heroic Emily, Charlotte said, “[she was] long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent,” but that “a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.” As character studies, these could hardly have been more suggestive and intriguing. The mystery of “the Bells” was solved—the legend of “the Brontës” begun.

—

IN THE MONTHS following her visit to London in December 1849, Charlotte felt much more intimate with her publisher George Smith, and his mother, and corresponded with both of them. Her second visit to their home, in the summer of 1850 (a new one—they had just moved to Gloucester Terrace), confirmed her increasing fondness for Smith, but also her vulnerability to his ebullient youthful charm. Defensively, she lampooned herself in advance as a dithery incompetent who would be “thankful to subside into any quiet corner of your drawing-room, where I might find a chair of suitable height,” perhaps hinting to him not to take her admiration the wrong way.

Charlotte was better prepared to meet the challenge of Smith’s hospitality this time round, and did so with grateful enthusiasm. There were as many outings as Miss Brontë could cope with—to the Royal Academy, the Opera, the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park (an amazing experience for Charlotte, seeing for the first time outside an engraved book lions, tigers, elephants, “cameleopards” and the zoo’s newly acquired hippopotamus)—and on the second Friday of her stay Mrs. Smith held a ball at Gloucester Terrace, to which both Dickens and Thackeray were invited. Thackeray’s reply expressed his regret that he wouldn’t be able to meet her on that occasion; Dickens, who was also unable to attend, cited “other and less agreeable engagements,” although his absence was of less moment to Charlotte. Williams and his family made a fine show: “all five were remarkable—their dress—their appearance were a decoration to the rooms—as Mrs. Smith afterwards remarked,” and they were graceful and elegant dancers. Whether Charlotte danced is not recorded. Did she ever dance, after the sorry attempts at school in Brussels? She never mentions dancing anywhere in her letters or novels. Was it one of the things she simply wasn’t interested in, or had somehow ruled out for herself?

G. H. Lewes wrote the party up (under a pseudonym) the following week in a piece jocularly complaining about how town was “full of authoresses,” prime among whom was “the charming CURRER BELL” surrounded by enthusiasts of Jane Eyre affecting “ ‘Rochester’ airs.” This image of a fully social Charlotte, charmingly coping with a crowd of male admirers, is so wildly at variance with almost every other description of her “company” manners (except the extraordinary, proposal-triggering charisma that so affected the curate David Pryce back in 1840) that one has to believe Lewes was smitten with her himself to some extent. Perhaps he picked up on a powerful signal from those brilliant and mesmerising eyes, for Charlotte fixed on him as soon as he entered the room and he spent most of the evening sitting next to her, “greatly interested by her conversation.” Unknown to Lewes, Charlotte was staring ardently at a face other than his own: Emily’s, which she saw in a ghostly way reflected there—“[Emily’s] eyes, her features—the very nose, the somewhat prominent mouth, the forehead—even at moments the expression.” It was a very peculiar sensation to have this bewhiskered controversialist rouse feelings of such tenderness, but she felt that whatever differences she and Lewes might continue to have about books and writing, she could now never hate him.^*5

Thackeray called a few days later with an invitation to dinner and sat talking for more than two hours with Charlotte and George Smith. She found the close attention of “the giant” in a private conversation much less intimidating than having to speak to him in a general party—indeed she found on this occasion an ease of expression that showed her true sense of equality with such a man. This was nothing to do with vanity, though Thackeray had every reason to be surprised at her forthrightness. “I was moved to speak to him of some of his short-comings (literary of course),” she reported in a letter to Ellen, who was presumably pretty surprised herself at this account of her friend’s temerity; “one by one the faults came into my mind and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence—He did defend himself like a great Turk and heathen—that is to say, the excuses were often worse than the crime itself. The matter ended in decent amity.”

Thackeray left his own accounts of their conversation: “Twice I recollect she took me to task for what she held to be errors in doctrine…She spoke her mind out. She jumped too rapidly to conclusions…Often she seemed to me to be judging the London folk prematurely: but perhaps the city is rather angry at being judged. I fancied an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy lives, our easy morals. She gave me the impression of being a very pure, and lofty, and high-minded person.”

Thackeray’s admiration for “Currer Bell” was less critical than hers for him, and his curiosity about her character and history was intense. Knowing hardly anything yet of Miss Brontë’s circumstances and personal history, Thackeray brought his superb novelist’s eye to bear on “the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes” that met his. “An impetuous honesty” was his wonderful phrase to describe her presiding characteristic. He saw her ardour for the truth, however inconvenient or abruptly expressed it might be. “New to the London world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her own; and judged of contemporaries, and especially spied out arrogance or affectation, with extraordinary keenness of vision.”

Smith devised a treat entirely suited to her tastes when he took Charlotte the following Sunday to the Chapel Royal in St. James’s, where the Duke of Wellington was a regular attendant. The previous week she had been admiring Landseer’s portrait of her hero on the field of Waterloo at the Royal Academy—here he was large as life, walking just a few yards in front of her after the service. “I indulged Miss Brontë by so arranging our walk that she met him twice on his way to Apsley House,” Smith recalled later. For Charlotte, it was understandably one of the “chief incidents” of her visit, and possibly of her life—a close encounter with the man she had idolised so intensely in her youth and whose Angrian avatar had been her earliest obsession. One senses Smith’s pleasure in arranging such an event and her pleasure in it must have been palpable. “I indulged Miss Brontë” could well have been his motto on these visits. He was treating her a little like an exotic pet, which responded only to the most expert handling.

Smith’s esteem for Charlotte was deep, and his desire to please and praise her was of course a first for her, made so wary by experience. She had had recognition of her ability and intelligence before—from Constantin Heger—but she had never been really admired for them until now. Her peculiarities didn’t bother Smith, because he had no interest in judging her socially (though he realised that his mother and sisters felt otherwise and found Miss Brontë “a somewhat difficult guest,” for her self-consciousness as much as anything). “Strangers used to say that they were afraid of her,” Smith wrote many years later. “For my own part, I found her conversation most interesting; her quick and clear intelligence was delightful. When she became excited on any subject she was really eloquent, and it was a pleasure to listen to her.”

After three weeks in his company and staying in his home, Charlotte had reached a state of intimacy with Smith that seems to have taken her somewhat by surprise. Her reason told her—severely—that there was no romantic content in his behaviour, but her heart responded warmly to the attention he lavished on her, his sincere admiration, his good looks and his “buoyant animal spirits.” But when he began to talk, as if it were simple and inevitable, of taking her with him on a trip to Edinburgh (where he was going, in the company of his sister Eliza, to fetch his younger brother Alick home for the holidays), Charlotte sensed that—whether he knew it or not—her publisher was crossing some line into a different category of connection. Mrs. Smith certainly thought so: Charlotte could tell from her manner and her readiness to support Charlotte’s opposition to the plan. But the more the women objected, the more Smith warmed to his own scheme and soon he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Writing to warn Ellen not to read too much into the fact that she was about to go travelling with her handsome young publisher, Charlotte made clear how significant, or tricky, she found the situation: “I believe that George and I understand each other very well,” she said, surely making Ellen sit up at the use of Mr. Smith’s Christian name and the great list of extenuating circumstances that followed—“[we] respect each other very sincerely—we both know the wide breach time has made between us—we do not embarrass each other, or very rarely—my six or eight years of seniority, to say nothing of lack of all pretensions to beauty &c. are a perfect safeguard—I should not in the least fear to go with him to China—I like to see him pleased—I greatly dislike to ruffle and disappoint him—so he shall have his mind.”

Her readiness to put herself in a category of absolute “safety” due to age and “lack of all pretensions to beauty &c.” sounds rather abject, until one reads what Smith said about her in a letter to Mrs. Humphry Ward many years later, a matter-of-fact judgement about Charlotte Brontë’s personal charms:

No, I never was in the least bit in love with Charlotte Brontë. I am afraid that the confession will not raise me in your opinion, but the truth is, I never could have loved any woman who had not some charm or grace of person, and Charlotte Brontë had none—I liked her and was interested in her, and I admired her—especially when she was in Yorkshire and I was in London. I never was coxcomb enough to suppose that she was in love with me. But, I believe that my mother was at one time rather alarmed.

“Especially when she was in Yorkshire and I was in London” was an ungallant way to admire a lady. In his memoirs, written forty years later, he was equally forthright about his first impression of Charlotte Brontë as being “interesting rather than attractive”:

She was very small, and had a quaint old-fashioned look. Her head seemed too large for her body. She had fine eyes, but her face was marred by the shape of the mouth and by the complexion. There was but little feminine charm about her; and of this fact she herself was uneasily and perpetually conscious.

Charlotte must have been aware of Smith’s judgement from the start, at some level or other. His charming manner confused her, though, and she accepted the invitation to go to Edinburgh with him at the end of June not quite sure of his intentions.

One of the highlights of this trip to London in the summer of 1850 was meant to be the dinner that Thackeray held in Currer Bell’s honour at his home in Young Street, Kensington, but it turned out comically badly. The family had been looking forward excitedly to meeting the author of Jane Eyre, and on the evening in question Thackeray’s elder daughter Anny, her sister, and governess, Miss Trulock, were lined up ready for “the great event”: “we all sat silent and expectant; my father, who rarely waited, waiting with us.” The carriage arrived, Smith jumped down, and in came Miss Brontë, “in mittens, in silence, in seriousness.” “This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all London talking, reading, speculating,” Anny recalled, in a marvellous evocation of the sorceress’s celebrity:

To say that we little girls had been given Jane Eyre to read scarcely represents the facts of the case; to say that we had taken it without leave, read bits here and read bits there, been carried away by an undreamed-of and hitherto unimagined whirlwind into things, times, places, all utterly absorbing and at the same time absolutely unintelligible to us, would more accurately describe our states of mind on that summer’s evening as we look at Jane Eyre—the great Jane Eyre—the tiny little lady.

But the excitement dissipated quickly. Miss Brontë was stiff and formal with everyone but the governess, and told Smith later that she found the girls’ manners too lively. At dinner, she listened intently to whatever her host said, but barely spoke or ate, and when the ladies all retired to the drawing room a dreadful constraint descended: “Every one waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all…The room looked very dark, the lamp began to smoke a little, the conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat round still expectant.” One guest bravely tried to open up a conversation by hoping that the famous authoress liked London, only to be told curtly, “I do and I don’t”—followed by silence. Another, Mrs. Procter, thought her introduction to the great Currer Bell had been “one of the dullest evenings she ever spent in her life,” and Thackeray himself found it all such a strain that at the first opportunity he escaped to his club. Anny came upon him in the hall, with his hat on and a finger to his lips.

What did Charlotte feel about the evening? Oddly enough, for one so self-conscious, her own social shortcomings don’t seem to have bothered her much. Perhaps she felt it absurd that anything might be expected of her, even at a reception given for her, when Thackeray was of the company. Perhaps it was her modesty as much as social ineptitude that made her such hard work to be seated next to at dinner. She certainly began to get a reputation, though, from occasions such as this for being chilly, possibly difficult and judgemental.

Smith was fully aware of what a failure the dinner had been, but in the carriage on the way back to Gloucester Terrace, Charlotte had something else entirely on her mind and startled Smith by leaning forward from her seat opposite him, putting her hands on his knees and saying, “She would make you a very nice wife.” At first, he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but Charlotte replied, “Oh! you know whom I mean,” and Smith realised she was referring to Mrs. Procter’s charming and beautiful 25-year-old daughter Adelaide, the author of a book of poems. Smith had certainly admired Miss Procter that evening, but not in the pointed way Charlotte detected, and one can’t help thinking she was presuming too much all round here and that her signalling of approval was impertinent. Touching him like that was a strangely inappropriate gesture. There seems something studied about it—as if she were staking a claim in an alternative kind of intimacy (like that of a sister or friend) to have when Miss Procter, or some other girl like her, finally did catch Smith’s eye and whisk him away.

Charlotte’s close observation of him cannot have been entirely pleasant for George Smith, who was no flirt. When he said that he found her “uneasily and perpetually conscious” of her own looks, he seemed puzzled and sorry that his admired author was, in effect, vain, that “the possession of genius did not lift her above the weakness of an excessive anxiety about her personal appearance. But I believe that she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful. Perhaps few women ever existed more anxious to be pretty than she, or more angrily conscious of the circumstance that she was not pretty.” One would like to hope this was not true for Charlotte, that the creator of Jane Eyre had more faith in herself, but the more she went into society, the more she was worn down by an extreme self-consciousness. Lucy Snowe in Villette, distracted by an awareness that she is not pleasing for Monsieur Paul to look at, seems to speak directly for the author when she says, “I never remember the time when I had not a haunting dread of what might be the degree of my outward deficiency…Was it weak to lay so much stress on an opinion about appearance? I fear it might be—I fear it was; but in that case I must avow no light share of weakness. I must own a great fear of displeasing.”

Charlotte’s awareness of her looks can hardly have been put under more strain on this eventful London visit than when Smith decided that she should sit for a portrait by the fashionable and expensive George Richmond, whom Smith knew through John Ruskin and whose chalk and crayon likenesses of writers and artists, including Martineau, Gaskell, Ruskin, Swinburne and Charlotte M. Yonge, were much admired. One can imagine Miss Brontë raised strong objections when this plan was first mooted, but Smith’s stated intention—to make a present of the portrait to Charlotte’s father—quickly trumped any of her personal misgivings.

She made three trips to Richmond’s York Street studio for the sittings over a period of nine days in June. The artist’s son later said that his father got the impression of “some early hip trouble” from her slightly ungainly carriage, and that she was “not remarkable in appearance except for having eyes of extraordinary brilliancy & penetration.” The sittings didn’t start auspiciously when Richmond asked his subject to remove a wad of brown merino wool that had stayed on top of her head when she took her bonnet off and that he imagined was connected with it. This was a hairpiece bought in Leeds preparatory to her visit, not performing as hoped, and of course Charlotte was mortified (to the point of tears) to have attention drawn to it. Richmond said that it took until the last of the sittings to get her to relax, and then only through the accident of the Duke of Wellington’s servant having left the house just as she arrived. The thought that she could have been introduced to the Duke himself fifteen minutes earlier enthralled Charlotte and distracted her from the ordeal of being scrutinised so that Richmond was able to catch the expression in the portrait. He shows her thoughtful and intense, animated not with high spirits, but with a brooding inner energy—an expression difficult for a society portraitist to flatter into pleasantness.

Richmond’s portrait is of great importance as it is the only one of Charlotte Brontë taken from life by a professional artist and so our best guide to what she really looked like. Branwell’s depiction of his sisters in The Brontë Sisters and the sketches remaining from the destroyed Gun Group have great iconic power but are hardly good records of the sitters’ actual features: Branwell’s Charlotte has the squareness of face described by Mary Taylor and the “general impression of chin” that Anne Thackeray noticed, but the expression is stolid and dough-like, which even people who despised Charlotte’s lack of beauty never accused her of. Richmond’s portrait managed both to flatter his subject and to record the “data” of her face, so to speak: his chalk highlights indicate the prominence of her noble brow, her large nose, the twist at the right side of her mouth and the length of her chin (minimised by the angle at which he posed her)—but his composition focuses attention on her large and luminous eyes, which he recognised as her outstanding feature, “illuminating features that would have otherwise been plain.”

It wasn’t Richmond’s practice to allow sitters to view his work in progress, but on the last day he showed the picture to Miss Brontë and stood waiting for a verdict, only to find to his surprise that she was silently in tears. She turned to him “half in apology” and explained that her emotional response was nothing to do with the likeness to herself but because the picture looked so much like her sister. Which sister is not clear, as two versions of the story exist, one citing Anne and the other Emily, but it was another incidence of Charlotte seeing ghost faces all around her in the new London scene she had entered, and when one stands in front of Richmond’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery today, it is strange to think of the subject seeing dead Emily or dead Anne there, rather than herself.

—

GEORGE SMITH’S inspired generosity changed Charlotte Brontë’s life in ways she had not imagined possible, but she retained a clear sense of her own social limitations, and fended off many of his initiatives on her behalf, knowing that they would exhaust her physically and mentally. The more she saw of the effects of fame (on Thackeray, for instance, whom she thought in danger of losing his head over it), the less she wanted it herself. She turned down invitations to meet Dickens socially, though the two seem to have been introduced, fleetingly, after a play that Smith took her to. In later life Smith said he had introduced them, and Charlotte told John Stores Smith, an early fan, that she had met Dickens but didn’t like him (although she admired his books). The contact of their imaginations, however, went much deeper. Dickens’s depiction of systematic negligence and cruelty in Nicholas Nickleby had impressed Charlotte and, as we have seen, probably contributed to her picture of Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Dickens told Lockhart that he had never read Jane Eyre, “and never would,” but he didn’t need to read such a talked-about book in order to be influenced by it in turn. His friend Forster, who had read Jane Eyre and was struck by the astonishing power of the early chapters being told from the oppressed child’s point of view, suggested to Dickens that it would be an interesting experiment to try the same thing, and Dickens, with his keen appetite for novelty, took up the idea immediately in the composition of David Copperfield. Between them, these two great novels marked a sea-change in how the developing consciousness was represented in art and how writers showed adult psychology being forged from childhood experience. We think nothing now of stories told from a child’s point of view, but Charlotte Brontë was the first to do it, and Dickens the second.

Charlotte’s friendships with fellow writers in these years gave her pleasure but did not make it easier for her to write—rather the contrary. She could not match the productivity of Martineau or Gaskell, and did not sufficiently trust her own ability to meet a deadline to accept the few offers she had to write for the commercial press. Her friendship with Martineau had started very promisingly with an invitation to her home in Ambleside in 1850; there Charlotte observed an enviably orderly and productive single writer’s life. Miss Martineau rose early, took a cold bath, went for a walk, had breakfast and was at work by eight thirty. Guests were expected to amuse themselves until two, when they would “meet, work, talk and walk together till 5.” Then dinner was followed by an evening of fluent and frank conversation, and after guests retired, Miss Martineau stayed up writing letters until midnight. “She appears exhaustless in strength and spirits, and indefatigable in the faculty of labour,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen, clearly awed and envious of this smoothly satisfying routine. Harriet Martineau had health, energy and “social cheerfulness” all far beyond Charlotte’s capacities, and her strong intellect was a pleasure to engage. One evening she showed Charlotte the work she was writing on the Peninsular War for Charles Knight’s History of the Thirty Years’ Peace and was surprised at the emotional reaction she got to a passage about the Duke of Wellington. “[S]he looked up at me and stole her hand into mine, and, to my amazement, the tears were running down her cheeks,” she told Mrs. Gaskell later. “I saw at once there was a touch of idolatry in the case, but it was a charming enthusiasm.” Charlotte’s impulse to take her hostess’s hand also shows the demonstrative, tactile spirit that was so often held in check.

But when Martineau’s jointly authored book, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development, was published the next year, Charlotte was painfully conflicted about her new friend. She had seen part of the book in proof at Ambleside, and gave Martineau the impression that, although she did not at all agree with its religious position (Martineau frankly admitted her agnosticism), “this did not prevent her doing justice” to its social objectives. This led Martineau to suspect Charlotte of hypocrisy and double-dealing later, when she found that Charlotte was as horrified as many readers and reviewers at the aggressive secularism of her vision and had written expressing it to her publisher, saying that Letters gave “a death-blow to [Martineau’s] future usefulness.” “Who can trust the word or rely on the judgment of an avowed Atheist?” Charlotte could not contemplate a life empty of faith; without it, the afterlife disappeared, and the hope of being reunited with her loved ones. If “a better place” did not exist, how could anyone face the “utter desolation” of this world?

—

CHARLOTTE’S TWO DAYS in Edinburgh with Smith after her stay at his house in June 1850 and his equally extraordinary invitation to her the next spring to join him on a cruise down the Rhine (which she felt she had to refuse), created the impression, in everyone else’s head but his own, that the handsome young publisher and Currer Bell were becoming significantly close. Ellen Nussey had seen with her own eyes how excited Charlotte was by her visit to London in June and the prospect of Edinburgh: Charlotte spent the week between these two trips at Brookroyd, not going home to Haworth. Even after her visit to Edinburgh (where Smith and his sister Eliza took her all round the capital, looking at sites connected with Walter Scott; they went out to Abbotsford to see the great man’s house), she didn’t go straight home but spent another few days with Ellen, exhausted by her travels and undoubtedly having one of her emotional collapses too. Being almost alone with charming “George” for three days had given Charlotte “some hours as happy almost as any I ever spent,” and Ellen needed no more encouragement to hear the distant sound of wedding bells. Charlotte poo-pooed the idea, but clearly considered it a possibility, and Patrick Brontë had somehow picked up on the possibility too, though he knew Smith only by name and as the sender of well-chosen parcels of books to the Parsonage. While Charlotte was still at Brookroyd, Patrick began to get nervous about her protracted absence from home (six weeks by this time) and feared her “somehow about to be married to somebody—having ‘received some overtures.’ ”

But at the same time that Smith was getting so friendly, Charlotte became aware of another possible admirer in the Cornhill office: Smith’s intense young colleague James Taylor. Quite what Taylor felt for Miss Brontë was hard to gauge, as he never got round to articulating it clearly, but their correspondence in 1850 had become important to both parties (though not witty and bantering like Charlotte’s letters to Smith), and when he announced that he would soon be leaving England to go to run a branch of the firm in Bombay—a post that necessitated at least five years’ absence—Charlotte found herself surprisingly sad and perturbed. Her letter of farewell conveyed this, and next thing she knew Taylor was asking to pay her a call at the Parsonage—he would happen to be passing, he said.

Taylor had been to the Parsonage before—when he picked up the manuscript of Shirley in the autumn of 1849—but this second visit was one of confused expectations and pregnant silences. Taylor looked older, stranger and very nervous—not surprisingly, perhaps, now that he was on the brink of declaring himself to the famous authoress. Quite what he said is unclear—even to Charlotte—but he seems to have suggested that on his return from India in five years he would like to marry her. His manner of expressing himself, however, was as repellent as ever, as Charlotte described to Ellen:

each moment he came near me—and that I could see his eyes fastened on me—my veins ran ice. Now that he is away I feel far more gently towards him—it is only close by that I grow rigid—stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger—which nothing softens but his retreat and a perfect subduing of his manner. I did not want to be proud nor intend to be proud—but I was forced to be so.

One would think the matter decided by this powerful antipathy, but Charlotte brooded on it for weeks and resented Taylor’s removal to the other side of the world, depriving her of a support in her solitude. More than his letters even, she felt she would regret “the exclusion of his idea from my mind,” showing a strange propensity to feel pain in almost abstract ways, like an old virus coming out in her nerve endings. She understood from hints Taylor had given that there had been some breach in relations between him and George Smith (who might have deliberately wanted him out of the London office for several reasons), and in her mind she couldn’t help wondering if the two entertained some rivalry over her. This shows a certain blindness about the feelings of both men—Taylor’s so strong (if unwanted); Smith’s so careless (if desired).

Rather alarmingly, Taylor’s motives seemed crystal clear to Patrick Brontë as soon as he heard that the visit was in the offing. He had taken a liking to “the little man” as Charlotte called him, bade him the sort of formal farewell he reserved for approved persons and referred to him afterwards “with significant eulogy,” as Charlotte wryly noted. “I have told him nothing—yet he seems to be au fait to the whole business—I could think at some moments—his guesses go farther than mine.” This penetration of the situation had made Patrick Brontë very disturbed on the day of the visit itself, and after Taylor had left, his smile collapsed and he was taken immediately ill in anticipation of an imminent proposal. The idea of Charlotte suddenly leaving him was his worst fear. But, over the succeeding weeks, Patrick Brontë quite made up his mind that a long engagement to James Taylor would be just the thing for his daughter; it meant he wouldn’t have to face the prospect of losing her yet, but that she would be supported by a husband in a future he might not live to see. The fact that she didn’t want to marry Taylor was not relevant as far as he was concerned and put him “out of patience.”

Charlotte had tried to explain to her father that, despite Taylor’s cleverness, she thought his mind essentially “second-rate” and his character lacking an essential element, “something of the gentleman,” as she told Ellen in a characteristically candid letter. Ellen hardly needed her friend to explain that she meant “the natural gentleman—you know I can dispense with acquired polish—and for looks—I know myself too well to think that I have any right to be exacting on that point.” But, regretfully, in Taylor she could not find “one passing glimpse of true good-breeding…it is hard to say—but it is true.”

It is interesting that Charlotte spent so much emotional energy refusing a man she quite disliked when almost under her nose was one so naturally gentlemanly as to not have imposed his feelings for Miss Brontë on her at all. Arthur Bell Nicholls nurtured his devotion, with decreasing hope, one imagines, all through these years when Charlotte was becoming famous locally and going up and down to London with hairpieces and bonnets in her luggage. He would have noted as keenly as anyone the second visit to the Parsonage of the agitated red-haired Londoner, and no doubt spent some anxious weeks waiting to hear of an engagement. He carried on his duties with admirable efficiency, but he was not very much appreciated or admired by the parson and his daughter, nor by the parishioners; his campaign to get the local Haworth women to stop drying their laundry in the churchyard made some of them wish he would not come back from his annual holiday in Ireland.

Charlotte did begin to notice Nicholls, gradually. She found him “good—mild and uncontentious” when invited to tea, and he had been surprisingly sporting about the caricature of him she had put into Shirley, along with (much worse) depictions of the other local curates. “Mr. Macarthey” in the novel labours faithfully in the Sunday School and day-school, and has only “proper, steady-going, clerical faults”; “finding himself invited to tea with a Dissenter would unhinge him for a week” and burying an unbaptised person “could make strange havoc in [his] physical and mental economy; otherwise, he was sane and rational.” Nicholls found this so amusing (or so flattering) that his landlady, Martha’s mother, heard him roaring with laughter as he read the book; “he sat alone—clapping his hands and stamping on the floor” with pleasure at it.

—

Shirley’s mixed reception in the winter of 1849/50 had been much as Charlotte feared: even the most well-disposed critics seemed disappointed not to have a suitably exciting sequel to Jane Eyre. One reviewer, in Fraser’s Magazine, described how he expected to be kept awake all night, as he had been by Currer Bell’s first novel, only to find that the new story had quite the opposite effect and sent him quickly to sleep; others complained bitterly about the “cool and solid” realism that had been Charlotte’s express aim to depict. One savage review in The Times appeared in December 1849, when Charlotte was staying at the Smiths’. George Smith had tried to hide the paper from his guest but failed, and when he saw her later with tears streaming down her face he knew she had seen its condemnation of her book as “at once the most highflown and the stalest of fictions.”

Charlotte’s confidence, shaky at the best of times ever since she had lost her armour of invisibility, took a battering from these salvos, and she struggled to find the will to start another book. Given the amount of writing she used to do in the years when she had no hope of an audience, this was ironic, to say the least. In her desire to have something to work on, she turned back to her manuscript of The Professor, regardless of Smith, Elder having rejected it so decisively just four years before. The fair copy, which has survived (a patchwork of different-aged papers and handwriting styles), presumably contains a set of significant further changes from this period, or she would not have dared to resubmit it to the firm in the spring of 1851. She may have cut the beginning of the book drastically, to reduce the rival-brothers plot that had owed so much to Branwell’s recycled Angrian story. And she certainly at this date wrote a preface explaining what she had intended to do: show the real struggles of a protagonist who “as Adam’s son…should share Adam’s doom—Labour throughout life and a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment.” Williams felt the changes had some merit, but he may have exaggerated this to compensate for the fact that George Smith still very much thought otherwise. The upshot was that The Professor was rejected for a ninth time overall, and Charlotte regretfully had to put it by—not in her desk, she told Smith, for she would see its unloved face peep out at her too often, but in a cupboard all by itself.

Charlotte was prepared to joke with Smith about her tenacious affection for her much-rejected book, saying “my feelings towards it can only be paralleled by those of a doting parent towards an idiot child…You may allege that [its] merit is not visible to the naked eye. Granted; but the smaller the commodity—the more inestimable its value.” She locked it out of sight, but the themes of the book—and its dramatisation of so much of the Brussels experience that had changed the course of her life—had come fresh to her mind again. Instead of tinkering with The Professor, she began to think of writing an entirely new novel around some of the same material, a novel that would confound the admirers of Jane Eyre and the critics of Shirley alike by taking realistic eventlessness to a new extreme.

Charlotte made a number of starts at Villette, casting and recasting her net around all the things she still wished to say about Brussels, the Pensionnat, Catholicism and Monsieur Heger, adding to them impressions and incidents from her more recent experiences in London, and her close, admiring observation of George Smith. Madame Heger appeared as the subtle, scheming directrice of the school, Madame Beck, whose jealousy of her impoverished English underling, Lucy, blights Lucy’s chances of love at every turn, but whose healthy egotism and instinct to dominate wins a grudging respect from her victim. George Smith appears as “Dr. John,” an Englishman abroad, whose healing temperament is suggested by his profession, but who exists in a world of sunny fortune so alien to Lucy that they can never quite co-exist, and, in a book bizarrely full of scenes when people fail to recognise each other, mistake identity, veil themselves, forget, deceive and change beyond recall, these two potential lovers are fated to share one glance of mutual understanding (not a loving glance, but a penetrating stare) and then part.

Constantin Heger, who was only introduced into The Professor obliquely as Zoraïde Reuter’s kinsman, appears in Villette in a startlingly literal portrait as Monsieur Paul Emanuel, the dark-haired, choleric, demanding but brilliant and charming teacher of French literature at Madame Beck’s pensionnat. His mannerisms, his speeches, his bons-bons, paletot, Greek cap and cigars are set down with daring explicitness: no one reading the novel who knew anything about the Brontës’ two years in Brussels would have had any trouble tracing the character back to its original. Charlotte’s use of him—and of their relationship—was like a gauntlet thrown down. In life he had cut her off—it was as if they had never known each other. What secret, then, was there to keep? In the novel, she could answer his silence with scenes remembered and imagined, details invented and forensically re-created: he would know exactly what she meant, but now had forfeited the right to reply.

To begin with, Charlotte had intended her narrator to be a “sensible, unimaginative” girl called Elizabeth Home, but this very un-Brontëish character soon departed, leaving in her place a disturbing, hypersensitive alter ego, a ticking bomb of emotions called Lucy Snowe. Lucy has suffered so much before the story even begins—in ways that are never specified—that she appears before us disinvested from life; orphaned, unloved, overlooked, her only objective is to subsist as best she can. She is a person without hope, without illusions and armoured against love; a soul, or a self, to use the coming term, pared back to essentials. She is a heroine who does not care what we think of her, who wants to be left alone, who stands by at the book’s appalling ending and watches our response to reading it.

—

WITH JAMES TAYLOR safely out of the way in India, Charlotte accepted another invitation from the Smiths, arriving at 112 Gloucester Terrace on 28 May 1851. Mrs. Smith took her to one of Thackeray’s lectures the next day, where Charlotte was alarmed to be not only an object of general interest in a very fashionable crowd, but singled out for notice by the lecturer at the end of his talk: he had been publicising the presence of “Jane Eyre,” and introduced her as such to one or two people, much to her discomfort. On the way out of the rooms, Charlotte had to pass through a bevy of admirers, whose deferential smiles made her tremble on her hostess’s arm—but with what mixture of fear, anger and excitement it is not possible to say.

The next day she was taken to the season’s unmissable wonder, the Great Exhibition, brainchild of the Prince Consort. This brilliant showcase for British manufacturing, design and engineering drew enormous crowds to the jewel-like “Crystal Palace” that had risen in the middle of Hyde Park; on the day that Charlotte first visited, she was awed to be among “thirty thousand souls,” a dreamlike swathe of humanity, among whom “not one loud noise was to be heard—not one irregular movement seen—the living tide rolls on quietly—with a deep hum like the sea heard from a distance.” The Exhibition included items from all round the world and aspired to promote world peace—a consumerist answer to the spirit of 1848, perhaps—but the overall effect was triumphantly nationalistic and aggressively commercial, a mesmerising vision of the riches technology had already produced and the promise of more to come. “The brightest colours blaze on all sides—and ware of all kinds—from diamonds to spinning jennies and Printing Presses are there to be seen,” Charlotte wrote home to her father. “It was very fine—gorgeous—animated—bewildering”:

Whatever human industry has created—you find there—from the great compartments filled with Railway Engines and boilers, with Mill-machinery in full work—with splendid carriages of all kinds—with harness of every description—to the glass-covered and velvet spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith—and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Charlotte’s protests that this sort of thing was “not much in my way” seem surprising, not just because her description of its being “a mixture of a Genii Palace and a mighty Bazaar” sounds so Angrian (Branwell Brontë would have been in heaven among the mixture of steam and gems) but also because she made five visits to the site during her three-week stay chez Smith. Was Charlotte thinking in terms of “research” as much as of pleasure? The last of her visits was in the company of Sir David Brewster, the distinguished optics inventor ^*6 (and a friend of the Kay-Shuttleworths), who gave Charlotte a personal tour and explained the science behind many of the exhibits. She seems to have been enthralled (as well she might have been) by the lush beauty of many objects in Paxton’s great glass halls: the fabrics, the silks, the Koh-i-noor diamond, the exiled French royal family (wandering around like any other bourgeois group there) and extraordinary novelties such as the bed that had an alarm fitted and tipped its occupant out at the appropriate hour—Thackeray should have one, she joked to George Smith, to help him finish Henry Esmond.

The idea of “research” certainly seems to have been behind Charlotte’s interest in gathering information in London that summer about the surge in popularity of Roman Catholicism (much promoted by the conversion of John Henry Newman in 1845 and the Oxford Movement to re-establish High Church traditions within the Church of England). Charlotte had seen and admired (while not agreeing wholeheartedly with her politics) the way in which Elizabeth Gaskell had addressed the plight of workers in the cotton trade in her first novel, Mary Barton, and she knew of Gaskell’s work-in-progress, Ruth, which controversially dealt with the fate of “fallen women” (among whom, as an urban minister’s wife, Gaskell had done much charitable work). Dickens’s effectiveness as a public educator was an even more impressive example, and perhaps Charlotte felt she too could use her position as a bestselling novelist to influence public opinion by featuring or dramatising the Catholic threat in her next book. On this 1851 visit to London, she attended a hardcore lecture on the subject by Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné, a French Protestant preacher; she also infiltrated a meeting of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society led by Cardinal Wiseman, of whom she sent a splenetic caricature to her father:

he has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin; he has a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it. He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite…All the speeches turned on the necessity of straining every nerve to make converts to popery. It is in such a scene that one feels what the Catholics are doing. Most perserving [sic] and enthusiastic are they in their work! Let Protestants look to it.

Charlotte was more of one mind (and voice) with her father here than over anything else in her life, and might well have thought it was an area in which she was qualified to speak. Villette didn’t end up with much—or any—topical relevance, mostly because the action is set (as all Brontë’s novels are) just out of range of the present day. But in the sheer amount of anti-Catholic polemic in the final volume of the novel, its hysterical nature (casting Madame Walravens, a grotesque dwarf, in the role of a papist witch) and its tenuous relevance to the plot one can perhaps see the relics of a different agenda.

That she was thinking about Constantin Heger in connection with her London excursions that summer is evident. It was “strangely suggestive to hear the French language once more” at d’Aubigné’s lecture, she told Ellen Nussey, and the very name of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society would have attracted her attention, since Monsieur Heger was a member of it.

—

GEORGE SMITH WAS overworked and preoccupied during much of Charlotte’s 1851 visit and left her to the care of his mother and sisters more than she would have chosen. As with James Taylor, she responded to signs of withdrawal with renewed tenacity, and as she sensed Smith treating her more and more like an aunt, so her spirits sank. Just as in Villette, when Lucy Snowe acknowledges the strength of her feelings for Dr. John only when she feels them slipping away, Charlotte began both to mourn the loss of a never-realised love for George Smith and to cling to signs of what it had almost been. When they visited a phrenologist together in June (the interpretation of bumps on the skull being a highly fashionable pseudo-science of the day), it must have been hard not to bask in the conspiratorial closeness of everything to do with this lark, or to see significance not just in the “readings” produced, but in the desire of Smith to have glimpses into the hidden depths of her character. They went to Dr. Browne’s studio on the Strand in the guise of a brother and sister, “Mr. and Miss Fraser.” Miss Fraser’s head was “very remarkable,” the doctor’s report concluded, exhibiting “the presence of an intellect at once perspicacious and perspicuous.” Browne detected a nervous temperament and a warmly affectionate nature, but not a sentimental one. “Her attachments are strong and enduring…Her sense of truth and justice would be offended by any dereliction of duty, and she would in such cases express her disapprobation with warmth and energy.”

She is sensitive and is very anxious to succeed in her undertakings, but is not so sanguine as to the probability of success…[she] should guard against the effect of this where her affection is engaged, for her sense of her own importance is moderate and not strong enough to steel her heart against disappointment.

George Smith read this “estimate” a short while later when Charlotte sent it on to him, but whatever he made of its revelations he kept to himself, and his benevolence, like that of Dr. John in Villette, remained at one remove from its object. Charlotte adopted a much warmer tone in her correspondence with him in the autumn of 1851, but he did not respond in kind, just as, when he took Charlotte to see the great tragedian Rachel (the stage name of Eliza Félix) act in Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur and as Camille in Corneille’s Horace, he seemed unwilling to submit to the power of the actress’s art in the way that Charlotte did. It was as if he was consciously holding back from the meeting of minds and spirits that she sensed was possible between them and that she had begun to crave.

Charlotte’s instinct was to proceed cautiously; she could of course not judge the validity of her own hopes and expectations. But it is strange to see her, in July 1851, imposing on herself exactly the sort of restrictions Constantin Heger had once demanded. “Before I received your last,” she wrote to Smith, “I had made up my mind to tell you that I should expect no letters from Cornhill for three months to come (intending afterwards to extend the abstinence to six months for I am jealous of becoming dependent on this indulgence—you—doubtless cannot see why, because you do not live my life.)—Nor shall I now expect a letter—but since you say that you would like to write now and then—I cannot say never write.”

She seems again to have been thinking of her experience with Heger when she made clear to Smith, later that autumn, that whatever else happened, she felt she had earned a permanent right to part of his attention. To Smith this can only have seemed inappropriately demanding, and he turned a blind eye to it, preferring a tacit continuation of business as usual with his intense and needy author. “Can I help wishing you well when I owe you directly or indirectly most of the good moments I now enjoy?” she wrote to him in September, in apology for not feeling able to oblige him by writing her next novel in serial form:

You do not know—you cannot know how strongly [Currer Bell’s] nature inclines him to adopt suggestions coming from so friendly a quarter; how he would like to take them up—cherish them—give them form—conduct them to a successful issue; and how sorrowfully he turns away feeling in his inmost heart that this work—this pleasure is not for him.

But though Currer Bell cannot do this—you are still to think him your friend—and you are still to be his friend. You are to keep a fraction of yourself—if it be only the end of your little finger—for him, and that fraction he will neither let gentleman or lady…take possession of—or so much as meddle with. He reduces his claim to a minute point—and that point he monopolises.

One “minute point,” under these terms, was of course a vast commitment. Well disposed as he was, generous, gregarious and gentlemanly to a fault, George Smith could never submit to it. By making this ostensibly minimal demand, Charlotte had unwittingly written the relationship’s death sentence.

^*1 Possibly he was suggesting one of his own daughters, though this isn’t clear from CB’s side of the correspondence (CB to WSW, 26 July 1849, LCB 2, 232).

^*2 Ellen Nussey’s self-identification with Caroline Helstone is not very convincing.

^*3 She wrote of the heroine, “we know her—we have lived with her, we shall meet her again” (letter to Julia Ward Howe, 28 July 1848, Laura E. Richards [ed.], “Letters of Florence Nightingale,” Yale Review, 24 [December 1934], 342–3).

^*4 Nightingale wanted to be thought of as her parents’ “vagabond son” (Bostridge, Florence Nightingale, 160).

^*5 There is a photograph of G. H. Lewes from almost this period that makes CB’s ardent identification of his and Emily’s features all the more interesting. Lewes was known as one of the ugliest men in London, it seems with justice, but there is something about his stare, and perhaps his defiant look, that could have spoken to Charlotte.

^*6 He had invented the kaleidoscope in 1816.