1851–5
Charlotte’s fast-growing friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell was the most rewarding of all she made in the years following her sisters’ deaths, despite their difference in religion (an issue Gaskell, as a Dissenter, was always sensitive to). Charlotte’s first visit to the Gaskells’ home in the summer of 1851 was brief—just a couple of days on the way back to Haworth from London—but assured Charlotte of a warm welcome there in the future, and by 1853 the two women had come to a friendly understanding that whenever Charlotte craved society and Elizabeth quiet, they would know where to turn. The Gaskells’ home at 42 Plymouth Grove was a large, airy villa in the Victoria Park area “quite out of Manchester Smoke,” with a large garden and orchard and French windows that were kept open all the long summer days (though it was one of William Gaskell’s indulgences also to keep a fire blazing in his study whatever the weather). The Gaskells’ four charming daughters, Marianne, Meta, Florence and Julia, flitted through the house; seven-year-old Julia Gaskell was Charlotte’s particular favourite, and she observed the little girl’s beauty and sprightliness with a strange awe—more like one child with a crush on another than an adult acquaintance (a covert doting very much like Lucy Snowe’s attitude to Paulina in Villette). When she tried to explain this feeling to Elizabeth Gaskell a year or so later, she said the girls made her feel like “a fond but bashful suitor who views at a distance the fair personage to whom—in his clownish awe—he dare not risk a near approach.” “[T]o what children am I not a stranger?” she said, as if she had never been one herself. “They seem to me little wonders—their talk—their ways are all matter of half-admiring—half-puzzled speculation.”
Elizabeth Gaskell had written her first novel, Mary Barton, during 1846, at the same time as Charlotte had been staying in Manchester with her father for his eye operation. Her husband had suggested writing as a distraction after the death of their only son the previous year, and her subsequent career as a novelist had been conducted under the full demands of a very busy domestic life, extensive social work connected with William Gaskell’s ministry (Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, in the centre of the city, was one of Manchester’s most thriving churches) and an enthusiastic pursuit of literary friendships, which included Dickens, the Carlyles, the Arnolds and the Brownings. Gaskell was also a friend of the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, and of the Nightingale family, and was an indefatigable letter-writer to them all. Charlotte looked with amazement on her friend’s life of activity; she could never match it, but it provided a valuable example of what was possible for a normally energetic and healthy woman to achieve and showed that a disciplined but lonely regime like Harriet Martineau’s was not the only way to pursue a writing career.
The winter of 1851/2 was, however, spent more at home than away. Charlotte’s health was very poor the whole season, with a long-lasting bilious condition that was made much worse by mercury poisoning from a medicine prescribed for it. Her spirits were also very low, not just because her book was progressing slowly and with difficulty, but because, for all the excitement of her new friendships, her essential loneliness seemed to have hardened and grown. She had invitations from the Gaskells, the Kay-Shuttleworths, Harriet Martineau and George Smith, but, in her depressed state, found the contrast between one mode of life and another too difficult to accommodate, as she tried to explain to Smith:
What is it you say about my breaking the interval between this and Christmas by going from home for a week? No—if there were no other objection—(and there are many) there is the pain of that last bidding good-bye—that hopeless shaking hands—yet undulled—and unforgotten. I don’t like it. I could not bear its frequent repetition. Do not recur to this plan. Going to London is a mere palliative and stimulant: reaction follows.
When the anniversary of Emily’s death came round again, she made sure that Ellen Nussey came for a visit and that she could have the comfort of sharing a bed with someone, a reminder of her sisters’ warmth and love, and the “calm sleep” that went with it. Keeper had died that month, in enfeebled old age. People had suggested both to Charlotte and to her father that the blind old dog should be put down, but neither had the heart to hasten by a single minute the departure of this last link to Emily.
Charlotte was also disturbed by the breaking off of relations with James Taylor, who by May 1852 had been in India almost a year and had written to her only twice. Having applied confidentially to Williams for his opinion of the man’s character, she had been unhappy to learn that Taylor was thought by his colleagues to be volatile and argumentative; her subsequent letters to him in Bombay were stiff and formal, almost guaranteeing an end to their friendship. “I am not sure myself that any other termination would be better than lasting estrangement and unbroken silence,” she wrote to Ellen (who had tactfully stopped inquiring about this particular person of interest), “yet a good deal of pain has been and must be gone through in that case.” She hated abandonment, even by a man to whom she was not very attached.
The painstaking return in memory to the sights, sounds and events of 1842–3 that Charlotte was living day to day in the composition of Villette also took its toll. The book—so different in mood from The Professor as to seem like the same story written by two entirely different people—was far more explicit, forensic even, about her feelings for Constantin Heger (and for George Smith). But it was the underlying feelings, the loveless condition from which Lucy emerges and lapses back into, that gave the book its grim power, the unexplained hopelessness at the base of her existence, so closely reflecting Charlotte’s deprived and bereaved state since the deaths of Emily and Anne and her own fears of dying. All her life’s suffering went into Villette, a cumulative account, as one of the reviewers, in The Examiner, later seemed to guess: “we find it difficult to disconnect from [the book] a feeling of the bitterness of experience actually undergone, and that a real heart throbs at such times under the veil of Lucy Snowe.” Indeed, Lucy’s tides of feeling flow as near to despair as a believer can go:
A sorrowful indifference to existence often pressed on me—a despairing resignation to reach betimes the end of all things earthly. Alas! When I had full leisure to look on life as life must be looked on by such as me, I found it but a hopeless desert: tawny sands, with no green field, no palm-tree, no well in view.
“[I]s there nothing more for me in life?” Lucy asks herself, when the hope of love has been indisputably removed, “nothing to be dearer to me than myself?” “Very good. I see a huge mass of my fellow-creatures in no better circumstances.” Her conclusion constitutes an alternative Creed: “I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.”
Charlotte had given up the idea—obviously discussed with Smith and Williams at some point—of bringing explicit topical interest to the book; her great contemporaries in that field were too intimidatingly good. “I cannot write books handling the topics of the day,” she warned her publisher, “it is of no use trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral—Nor can I take up a philanthropic scheme though I honour Philanthropy—And voluntarily and sincerely veil my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s work—‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ”*1 Villette could never pretend to such seriousness, she felt; besides, the book had gathered its own peculiar momentum and unity of purpose. It travelled inward, not outward. But by choosing this unusual path, Charlotte Brontë ended up addressing public interest of a new sort and the preoccupations of the coming age. Villette, forged from such personal and painful material, reached psychological depths never attempted in fiction before and became, unwittingly, a landmark in the depiction of states of mind and self-perception, a thoroughly, peculiarly and disturbingly Modernist novel.
—
THAT SUMMER Charlotte did not visit the Smiths in London but went on her own to the seaside instead, taking her unfinished manuscript with her. She felt guilty about not informing Ellen of her trip—or suggesting they went together—but there were private reasons for wanting to be alone. As well as working on her novel, Charlotte intended to make a pilgrimage to Anne’s grave in Scarborough (coinciding with the anniversary of her death) and to inspect the stone that she had ordered in 1849 but never seen. There were five errors on it, a shameful mess in the sorrowing sister’s eyes, almost like proofs from Newby. Stricken by feelings of negligence, she ordered the corrections to be made immediately.
Charlotte went on to Filey, to the same lodging house where she and Ellen had stayed after Anne’s death, and spent a melancholy month there, going on coastal walks (or “trudges,” as she described them cheerlessly), bathing once in the sea and attempting to recruit her strength. “The Sea is very grand,” she wrote to her father. “Yesterday it was a somewhat unusually high tide—and I stood about an hour on the cliffs yesterday afternoon—watching the tumbling in of great tawny turbid waves—that made the whole shore white with foam and filled the air with a sound hollower and deeper than thunder.” It was cold and lonely, and her thoughts went back to Anne’s death, and to anxieties about Martha and her father, both of whom had been ill. She also thought about Mr. Nicholls: when she was at church in Filey, an absurd bit of shuffling about by the choir and congregation (when both ended up facing away from the pulpit during a hymn) had almost managed to amuse her, and she knew it would have amused him. “[H]ad Mr. Nicholls been there—he certainly would have laughed out,” she told her father, asking at the end of her letter to be remembered kindly to that person.
—
THE AUTUMN CAME and Villette was still unfinished. Aware of Smith’s expectations to publish a new work by Currer Bell as soon as possible (it was three years since the appearance of Shirley), she sent him the first two volumes on their own, longing to know what he thought—“not that I am likely to alter anything,” she cautioned. Smith must have been consternated to find that the new novel returned so doggedly to the material of The Professor, and was a book of such sombreness and negativity. He had queries about the flow of the narrative and the consistency of the characterisation (as well he might have—both are extremely confusing) and can’t have failed to recognise, and been perturbed by, the portraits of himself and his mother contained in Charlotte’s characterisation of Dr. John Graham Bretton and Mrs. Bretton, and the inclusion of scenes (such as the fire in the theatre) lifted whole from his own experience. His curiosity about how the plot was going to end, therefore, had a very personal slant. Was his bestselling author about to publish a love story in which they were married off to each other at the end? Charlotte’s précis of the third volume was a form of covert reassurance:
Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited and sweet-tempered; he is a “curled darling” of Nature and of Fortune; he must draw a prize in Life’s Lottery; his wife must be young, rich and pretty; he must be made very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody—it must be the Professor—a man in whom there is much to forgive—much to “put up with.” But I am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost*2 —from the beginning I never intended to appoint her lines in pleasant places.
Smith would also have been troubled by Charlotte’s hope that the new novel might be published anonymously, in an attempt to claw back the freedom she had felt when writing Jane Eyre. “If the witholding of the author’s name should tend materially to injure the publisher’s interest—to interfere with booksellers’ orders &c. I would not press the point; but if no such detriment is contingent—I should be most thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito,” she wrote to him when she sent the first two volumes. “I seem to dread the advertisements—the large lettered ‘Currer Bell’s New Novel’ or ‘New Work by the Author of “Jane Eyre.” ’ These, however, I feel well enough are the transcendentalisms of a retired wretch.” This is the most explicit evidence of how Charlotte’s fame had begun to oppress her, and of how much the tragic story of Emily’s and Anne’s short lives and early deaths, as revealed in her 1850 edition of their novels, had worked on public opinion. She did not wish to be “consumed” by a public hungry for celebrities. But the name of “Currer Bell” was too valuable for Smith to put by, and, unsurprisingly, he insisted on using it.
Had the hope that she would be allowed to “walk invisible” again in Villette affected the way Charlotte wrote the book? It is certainly the most explicitly personal of all her works, laying out scenes and characters in direct imitation of real ones, which would be instantly recognisable to anyone of her acquaintance. Her trips to the theatre, to the Conservatoire concert, to the Salon Exhibition, the fête in the park, and of course the whole layout and organisation of the Pensionnat are put into the novel unedited and unabridged, with the flavour of meticulously recalled memories. The degree of artificiality in the novel would be truly evident only to the novelist—her friends would of course mostly see a peculiarly thorough form of self-exposure. Thackeray read it as straight autobiography, writing to his young friend Lucy Baxter,
it amuses me to read the author’s naïve confession of being in love with 2 men at the same time; and her readiness to fall in love at any time. The poor little woman of genius! the fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature! I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame rather than any other earthly good or mayhap heavenly one she wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny worth of good looks, thirty years old I should think buried in the country, and eating up her own heart there, and no Tomkins will come.
Unknown to him, of course, Charlotte Brontë had her very own Tomkins resident in Haworth—but whether she craved him as Thackeray imagined was another matter.
Charlotte sent off the last volume of Villette to Cornhill on 20 November 1852, but then had to endure a long silence from Smith. Did he hate the ending—did he hate the whole book? On 1 December she could bear the wait no longer and wrote directly to ask him, only to have several more days’ anxiety before his reply finally arrived. He had more cavils about the focus of the story, complaining about the “transfer of interest” from one group of characters to another at the end (and the introduction of the new romance with Monsieur Paul). Again Charlotte said she agreed with him, but did nothing to change her manuscript. Her only significant adjustment at this stage was to switch the heroine’s surname.
The most tangible sign of Smith’s disappointment in the novel was his offer of only £500 for the copyright, when Charlotte, and her father, had expected an increase on that sum, the same as for Jane Eyre and Shirley. But Smith clearly did not expect a runaway success, either in terms of sales or of reviews. Currer Bell’s public all longed for a reprise of the Jane Eyre thrill, and Villette, for all its power, was unable to supply that.
—
RELEASED FROM THE LABOUR of finishing her book, Charlotte allowed herself to think of another trip to London of a few weeks, to coincide with the correction of proofs and to see the book through to publication. Not knowing she was about to be depicted in Charlotte’s new novel, Mrs. Smith had held open an invitation and a date was set for the new year. Charlotte prepared by buying new bonnets and dress materials in Leeds and having the errant 1850 hairpiece “rearranged”—“it is now a very different matter to the bushy, tasteless thing it was before.” But before the trip could go ahead, and two weeks before Christmas 1852, Charlotte was completely taken by surprise and the household thrown into turmoil by a drama unfolding rapidly at the Parsonage. She wrote to Ellen about it two days later, wondering if her friend had had any intimation that Arthur Bell Nicholls was in love with her, since she, not being able to see clearly, she said, had not understood the significance of his gestures and looks, beyond “dim misgivings.” Papa, for all his physical blindness, seems to have picked up much more of what had been passing (as he had with James Taylor) and had noticed “with little sympathy and much indirect sarcasm” the curate’s recent low spirits and threats to leave Haworth.
On the evening of 13 December, the three of them had been taking tea in Reverend Brontë’s study and Charlotte “vaguely felt…the meaning of [Nicholls’s] constant looks—and strange, feverish restraint.” As usual, she left the two men alone after a while and retired to the dining room. Between eight and nine o’clock, she heard the study door open and expected it to be followed by the sound of the front door shutting, but instead there was a hesitation, the sound of a silent curate hovering in the hall, and then a gentle tap at the dining-room door.
like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He entered. He stood before me. What his words were—you can guess; his manner—you can hardly realize—nor can I forget it—Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale, speaking low, vehemently yet with difficulty—he made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection when he doubts response…He spoke of sufferings he had borne for months—of sufferings he could endure no longer—and craved leave for some hope.
Nicholls was not just in love, but painfully so, and the spectacle of “one ordinarily so statue-like—thus trembling, stirred, and overcome” was astonishing to Charlotte, who had no idea that he was capable of such passion. Her sympathy flared up at the thought of how he must have suffered in silence for so long; and it was as a fellow victim of a one-sided passion, rather than as someone in love with her, that her heart went out to him. But of course she did not encourage this sudden suit. Whatever her feelings for him at this point (and they were not ardent), the interview gave her “a strange shock”: “I could only entreat him to leave me then and promise a reply on the morrow. I asked if he had spoken to Papa. He said—he dared not—I think I half-led, half put him out of the room.”
Nicholls’s fear of speaking to Mr. Brontë on this topic was fully justified, as Charlotte discovered when she went into the study as soon as Nicholls left and reported what had taken place:
Agitation and Anger disproportionate to the occasion ensued—if I had loved Mr. N— and had heard such epithets applied to him as were used—it would have transported me past my patience—as it was—my blood boiled with a sense of injustice—but Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with—the veins on his temples started up like whip-cord—and his eyes became suddenly blood-shot—I made haste to promise that Mr. Nicholls should on the morrow have a distinct refusal.
The symptoms of imminent apoplexy put an end to any debate. Charlotte had been told by the doctor just a few months earlier that her father’s blood pressure was so high that any “rush to the brain” would “almost be to kill him at once.” But in her careful noting of Papa’s symptoms, one senses Charlotte’s shifting sympathies, away from his incontinent display of selfishness and towards her own feelings and judgements, which she had never abandoned of course, but which were so habitually subordinated to those of her parent.
There followed a period of dreadful turmoil in the Parsonage, with Patrick Brontë fuming and furious on one side, Nicholls distraught and desperate on the other, and Charlotte stuck in the middle. As soon as he understood the strength of the vicar’s disapproval, Nicholls resigned and promised to leave Haworth by the following May, but the amount of “turbulence of feeling” produced in the interim consternated Charlotte, since it had so little to do with her. Meanwhile she was forced to listen to her father’s constant outbursts of indignation against the curate: “He just treats him with a hardness not to be bent—and a contempt not to be propitiated.”
When the cause of the trouble was known around the Parsonage, Charlotte was sorry to find that she was the only person to pity Mr. Nicholls. Martha was “bitter against him” (probably thinking no one was good enough for Miss Brontë), while Martha’s father, John Brown the sexton, said he wanted to shoot him—uncomfortable for Nicholls, as Brown was his landlord. “They don’t understand the nature of his feelings,” Charlotte explained to Ellen, indicating the way her own were changing subtly as people around her ganged up. “Mr. N is one of those who attach themselves to very few, whose sensations are close and deep—like an underground stream, running strong but in a narrow channel.”
Early in the new year Nicholls made an inquiry to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, offering his services abroad as a missionary. Any idea that this was a touch of melodrama on Nicholls’s part is scotched by the degree of commitment such an application required, with a full account from the candidate of his qualifications and intentions and four testimonials witnessing to his character and achievements. One of these, unfortunately, had to be elicited from the man he had just incensed, who wrote a fair but tight-lipped letter, clearly intended to speed the removal of the offender to some remote part of the globe: “He is very discreet, is under no pecuniary embarrassment, that I am aware of, nor is he, I think, likely to be so, since, in all pecuniary and other matters, as far as I have been able to discover, he is wary, and prudent.” The qualifications here seem as prominent as the statements.
Nicholls did rather better from his other referees, who all praised his exceptional zeal and ability, especially in the management of the school, and the vicar of Bradford added that Nicholls had worked wonders in a parish so full of “a rude, and dissenting population” that his work “has nearly approached that of a missionary” already.
Charlotte felt her father was glad for once to pack her off to London at the end of January, and the Smiths thought her more animated than usual, without knowing why. She asserted herself more too, asking not to go much into society or on pleasure trips to the theatre et cetera, but to be taken to places illustrating “rather the real than the decorative side of Life”—Newgate and Pentonville prisons, the Bank of England, the Bethlehem Hospital (the asylum for the insane known as Bedlam), the Stock Exchange and the Foundling Hospital. “Mrs. S[mith] and her daughters are—I believe—a little amazed at my gloomy tastes, but I take no notice.” Having decided that she could not write on “matters of public interest” without giving them proper study, and with Villette behind her, perhaps Charlotte was thinking of future material—if so, it seems as if it might have strayed over into Dickens’s territory. At Newgate (a site that Dickens had used in Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist and, most recently, Barnaby Rudge), George Smith recalled Miss Brontë quickly fixing her attention on an individual prisoner: “There was a poor girl with an interesting face, and an expression of the deepest misery. She had, I believe, killed her illegitimate child. Miss Brontë walked up to her, took her hand, and began to talk to her. She was, of course, quickly interrupted by the prison warder with the formula ‘Visitors are not allowed to speak to the prisoners.’ ”
Charlotte was in town when Villette was published on 28 January 1853, to widespread and for the most part very laudatory reviews. Charlotte reported to Ellen that she had received seven good notices on two consecutive days in February, enough “to make my heart swell with thankfulness to Him who takes note both of suffering and work and motives—Papa is pleased too.” The reviewer in the Literary Gazette acknowledged the book’s strange evanescent qualities, the trance-like movement between states of mind rather than scenes, by saying “It must be read continuously,—we had almost said, studied, before its finest qualities can be appreciated,” while G. H. Lewes brought weight to bear in the Leader with resounding praise that delighted the author: “In Passion and Power—those noble twins of Genius—Currer Bell has no living rival, except George Sand. Hers is the passionate heart to feel, and the powerful brain to give feeling shape; and that is why she is so original, so fascinating.”
“Currer Bell might have called her new novel ‘Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself,’ ” said the Spectator, drolly acknowledging the almost plodding drabness of the plot, and how little the plot mattered among so many “violent emotions of the heart.” That Charlotte had wondered how the book would be received in Brussels is clear from the fact that she tried to retain control over any possible translation of it into French; but, while she waited to see if there was any response from the rue d’Isabelle, she became aware of the amusing effect her portrait of Monsieur Paul was having elsewhere. Several letters reached her, via Smith, Elder, from women wanting to know more about the fate of the harsh, demanding, secretly honourable and devoted Master. “You see how much the ladies think of this little man whom none of you like,” she teased Williams. One correspondent who had previously determined to marry only the counterpart of Mr. Knightley (from Jane Austen’s Emma) “now…vowed that she would either find the duplicate of Professor Emanuel or remain forever single!!!”
The focus on Lucy’s hunger for sexual love, so desperately and unconventionally aimed first at Dr. John and then at Monsieur Paul, did not escape notice or censure, most prominently from Harriet Martineau, whose review in the Daily News was one of the first to appear. She had written privately in advance to Charlotte, who, for all her talk of welcoming criticism of her novel, was upset that Martineau disliked the treatment of love in it, “either the kind or the degree.” In her printed review, Martineau expanded this theme, pointing out, with some justice, the disservice it did to women to represent them as such abject slaves to one emotion. Charlotte reacted in her most high-falutin manner. Having made such a show of championing Miss Martineau against critics of her atheism, she felt she was owed more loyalty than this. Before the review even appeared, she remonstrated with Martineau: “I know what love is as I understand it—& if man or woman shd. feel ashamed of feeling such love—then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth as I comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth & disinterestedness.” It is strange that Charlotte tried to represent in such a heroic light her anatomy of desire and not “love” but love sickness, so brilliantly but unheroically depicted in Lucy Snowe’s haunted, hungry soul.
There were other, fiercer, critics, whose opinions Charlotte never got to hear. Matthew Arnold hated the book because it dealt too clearly with a malaise among middle-class women—their frustrations and unanswered desires in both love and the world—which he did not like to contemplate: “the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact put into her book.” But it was exactly this power to discomfit people that made Charlotte’s work valuable to others. The very elements that made Arnold avert his eyes made George Eliot (yet to publish any novels herself) think Villette “a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.” “Villette—Villette—” she wrote a month later, “have you read it?”
—
ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS HAD chosen his time to declare himself shrewdly. No doubt he had waited deliberately until Charlotte’s novel, so long in the making, was finished and sent off to London, knowing how preoccupied she would be until then and unreceptive to his suit. Not knowing the contents of the book, he could not have guessed how much it related to questions of choices in love, right and wrong desires and decisions. When she went down to London to oversee the correction of proofs and wait for the book’s reception, Charlotte had plenty of time to think about Nicholls in this powerful new light and wonder what her experience of love had come to up to this point; where she should have been looking for it, and where she might have found it.
Her father’s hysterical letters to her from home showed a bizarre assumption that, on the subject of her suitor, they thought as one. Nicholls, he felt sure, had exposed his “dangerous designs” and was no longer to be trusted: “His conduct might have been excus’d by the world, in a confirmed rake—or unprincipled army officer, but in a Clergyman, it is justly chargeable, with base design and inconsistency…[I] wish that every woman may avoid him, forever, unless she should be determined on her own misery.” In case Charlotte hadn’t got the message, he wrote another horribly cloying letter, in the character of Flossy, reporting on the seducer’s “manoeuvres” witnessed from a doggy vantage point: “I see people cheating one another, and yet appearing to be friends—many are the disagreeable discoveries, which I make…Ah! My dear Mistress, trust dogs rather than men—They are very selfish, and when they have the power, (which no wise person will readily give them) very tyrannical.” Patrick Brontë clearly thought this clever and charming and the warning about tyrannical men not in the least bit applicable to himself.
Nicholls had been making anxious inquiries to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel about the progress of his application, but towards the end of February asked if they could suspend the process indefinitely, as “some doubts have occurred to me as to the desirability of leaving the country at present.” He seems to have decided to stand his ground—though not ground in Haworth: he had applied for a separate curacy at Kirk Smeaton, about twelve miles away and was to move there in June. In the meantime, his increasingly melancholic and erratic behaviour was causing gossip in the village. He was said to sit in his rooms alone for hours, or take his long face on glum solitary walks. When forced into the company of Reverend Brontë, he was surly and snappish and had caused raised eyebrows by his withdrawn manner when the Bishop came to stay in March. Charlotte had begun to worry about “that dark gloom of his” and that he had followed her along the lane after church, also stopped her in the passageway on the Bishop evening, forcing a strategic retreat upstairs. Martha had noted his “flaysome” looks on that occasion, and developed a very unflattering view of Nicholls’s character. The only person he saw was his friend Sutcliffe Sowden, curate of Oxenhope, but he had spread no stories about his rebuff at the Parsonage; “I own I respect him for this,” Charlotte told Ellen.
I pity him inexpressibly. We never meet nor speak—nor dare I look at him—silent pity is just all I can give him—and as he knows nothing about that—it does not comfort…alas! I do not know him well enough to be sure that there is truth and true affection—or only rancour and corroding disappointment at the bottom of his chagrin. In this state of things I must be and I am—entirely passive. I may be losing the purest gem—and to me far the most precious—life can give—genuine attachment—or I may be escaping the yoke of a morose temper—In this doubt conscience will not suffer me to take one step in opposition to Papas will—blended as that will is with the most bitter and unreasonable prejudices. So I just leave the matter where we must leave all important matters.
Charlotte felt powerless, but was hardly as entirely passive as she claims. Warned by her father so melodramatically about Nicholls’s malignant temper and dark designs, she was on the look-out constantly for evidence to the contrary and, all through these uncomfortable months while he was waiting to leave Haworth, took the opportunity to assess his demeanour. She soon had proof of his feelings (and felt “punished” for her doubts of him), when, on Whit Sunday, taking the communion service for the last time in Haworth, Nicholls lost control of himself in church and began to shake and falter when he saw Charlotte at the rail. “[He] stood before my eyes and in the sight of all the communicants white, shaking, voiceless.” The parish clerk had to have a word with him, but Nicholls could only whisper the rest of the service. Several ladies in the congregation were moved to tears by this spectacle, and Charlotte herself was almost overcome, but when Reverend Brontë heard of these shameless displays of sentimentalism, his response was to call Nicholls an “unmanly driveller.” “Compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for than sap from firewood,” Charlotte remarked bitterly to Ellen. A further point in Nicholls’s favour was his refusal to suggest any criticism of Patrick Brontë when quizzed by curious parishioners, though Charlotte couldn’t help noticing his continued chilliness towards her father in person. A snub at the school’s tea-drinking was the sort of public discourtesy that she knew Papa would “never…forget or forgive.” “I am afraid both are unchristian in their mutual feelings,” Charlotte wrote sadly to Ellen, stuck in the middle of this battle of wills. “Nor do I know which of them is least accessible to reason or least likely to forgive. It is a dismal state of things.”
—
NICHOLLS LEFT HAWORTH on 27 May, having received a handsome gold watch from the parish and Sunday School in recognition of his eight years of service. Not surprisingly, Patrick Brontë found himself indisposed on the day of the presentation and did not attend. Nicholls delivered the deeds of the school to Reverend Brontë on the evening before his departure, but his hopes of seeing Charlotte to say goodbye were thwarted by her sitting room being occupied by the servants, who were washing down the paintwork. Charlotte didn’t want to see Nicholls in her father’s presence, so said she was not available; however, when she surreptitiously watched him leave the house for what he imagined was the last time, she noticed that he lingered near the garden gate, in obvious distress. Her heart went out to him:
remembering his long grief I took courage and went out trembling and miserable. I found him leaning again[st] the garden-door in a paroxysm of anguish—sobbing as women never sob. Of course I went straight to him. Very few words were interchanged—those few barely articulate: several things I should have liked to ask him were swept entirely from my memory. Poor fellow! but he wanted such hope and such encouragement as I could not give him. Still I trust he must know now tha[t] I am not cruelly blind and indifferent to his constancy and grief.
Though Charlotte believed she could and had not encouraged Nicholls at this tender moment, he was made of sterner stuff, and clearly stored the scene away with renewed hope, however small. Charlotte, on the other hand, felt much worse at their parting, waking up as she was to her own feelings. She did not even know where Nicholls’s new curacy was going to be, and saw no chance of hearing anything more about him, except through second-hand sources and gossip, the worst possible channels. She had to revert to her lonely life with her father, and, worst of all, witness his voluble relief at having routed the interloper, for, as she told Ellen, Patrick Brontë remained “implacable” on the subject of the wily curate.
Following Nicholls’s departure, Charlotte became ill with influenza, exacerbated by a continued headache and other nervous symptoms that left her so “weak and bewildered” that she had to put off a visit by Elizabeth Gaskell that she had been looking forward to. Her father was also ill, and, despite his late shameful behaviour in relation to her, Charlotte’s compassion and anxiety for him were still intact. When one evening she heard him call her name, she rose from her sickbed and found him “strangely arrested” on the stairs, holding a candle but saying that he could see nothing. The old terror of losing his sight gripped both of them, and, though Patrick began to recover the next day, saying “it seemed as if a thick curtain was gradually drawn up,” the incident served to make any travel away from home impossible.
Ellen filled the need for companionship by coming to stay at the Parsonage in late June, but the visit proved an unhappy one for their friendship. Charlotte had a great deal to share about the distressing events of the past few months, and Nicholls’s departure from Haworth. Her letters to Ellen about the proposal and its aftermath had, as ever, been frank and vivid, but may have veiled the intensity of her feelings, and her growing regrets that the relationship seemed to be over. All this became evident to Ellen when she saw her friend face to face, and she took it as signs of weakness and defection. Perhaps Charlotte had already received one of the “very miserable” letters she later told Catherine Winkworth that Nicholls had written to her from exile, which she had answered by saying he must submit to his lot as well as he could. Nicholls carefully kept this line of communication open.
Charlotte certainly seemed to be thinking more sympathetically than ever of the former curate now that he was gone, and Ellen didn’t like it. Ellen’s misgivings about him as a potential husband for her friend are understandable: she had known Nicholls for the past eight years and didn’t find him at all exciting—more to the point, Charlotte had hardly had a good word to say for him all that time. Having been privy to so many intimate conversations over the years, and the recipient of so many confiding letters, Ellen might well have felt the full force of Charlotte’s inconsistency and been piqued or disturbed by it. It downgraded her own consistency and fidelity. Whatever the exact grounds for their falling-out, it is clear that she and Charlotte quarrelled seriously for the first time ever, either during her visit to Haworth in July 1853 or soon after, and no letters exist from this time until eight months later.
Simple jealousy must have also played its part in the rift, as Ellen knew she would be significantly sidelined if Charlotte fell in love or got married. At the age of thirty-six (she was one year younger than Charlotte almost to the day) Ellen had got used to the idea of being an old maid and wrote complainingly to Mary Taylor about Charlotte abandoning their supposed joint fate, and how she would be best off “bearing her position” and “enduring to the end” without Mr. Nicholls disturbing everything. It was a pity that Charlotte couldn’t have seen Mary Taylor’s sharp reply: “You talk wonderful nonsense abt C. Brontë in yr letter,” Mary scolded.
If its C’s lot to be married shd n’t she bear that too? or does your strange morality mean that she shd refuse to ameliorate her lot when it lies in her power. How wd. she be inconsistent with herself in marrying? Because she considers her own pleasure? If this is so new for her to do, it is high time she began to make it more common. It is an outrageous exaction to expect her to give up her choice in a matter so important, & I think her to blame in having been hitherto so yielding that her friends can think of making such an impudent demand.
By the time this reached Birstall, in the summer of 1854, much of its force would have been spent; Mary knew that she was essentially talking out loud in her home above the shop she was running in Wellington, New Zealand, on the other side of the world. But what she lost in dialogue, she made up for in truth-telling.
Back when Ellen wrote to Mary, though, in the summer of 1853, Charlotte was becoming increasingly isolated herself. Arthur Nicholls had removed to Kirk Smeaton, Ellen was estranged, she had broken friends with Harriet Martineau and felt so much that her influence over George Smith was on the wane that she wrote to chide him over his negligence of her, making clear her own upset and anger: “when you turn with distaste from the task of answering a friendly letter…let me just say, though I say it not without pain, a correspondence which has not interest enough in itself to sustain life—ought to die.” Pressure of work was insufficient explanation for the falling-off of Smith’s correspondence since the publication of Villette. Had she heard somehow, or sensed, that his thoughts were elsewhere—that he had in fact fallen madly in love? For, in the months since her visit to London (which turned out to be her last), Smith had met young, lovely Elizabeth Blakeway, the woman he would propose to later that year.
—
WITH ALL THE TIME in the world to be writing, Charlotte was doing very little. In the spring of 1853, with Villette successfully published, she made the surprising announcement to Elizabeth Gaskell that she was “not going to write again for some time,” though the next month, she wrote the fragments now known as “The Story of Willie Ellen,” a return to the theme of two rival brothers. It did not, however, get far—just a dozen or so pages.
After reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s sprightly Cranford in July 1853 (and now knowing what a frenetically busy home life Gaskell managed as well as writing) she asked, “Do you…find it easy, when you sit down to write—to isolate yourself from all those ties and their sweet associations—[so] as to be quite your own woman—uninfluenced, unswayed by the consciousness of how your work may affect other minds—what blame, what sympathy it may call forth? Does no luminous cloud come between you and the severe Truth—as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing Soul?”
Deprived of her usual resource in Ellen, Charlotte went to stay with Miss Wooler in Hornsea in October, and accompanied Joe Taylor, his wife Amelia and baby “Tim” (the nickname for their daughter) on a trip to Cumberland. She clearly felt at home neither with undiluted maiden-ladyhood nor with the young parents, and remained a sarcastic observer of the Taylors’ fussy modern manners: “Papa and Mamma could only take their meals, rest and exercise at such times and in such measure as the despotic infant permitted. While Mrs. J. eat her dinner, Mr. J—relieved guard as nurse. A nominal nurse indeed accompanied the party, but her place was a sort of anxious, waiting sinecure, as the child did not fancy her attendance.”
Elizabeth Gaskell’s deferred first visit to Haworth in September was much more to Charlotte’s taste and an opportunity to release herself into intimacy, for however brief a time. Gaskell wrote one of her headlong letters to John Forster soon after she got home to Plymouth Grove, crammed with details of her week at Currer Bell’s home, the wild situation, the “pestiferous” churchyard, with the graves peering over the wall of the Parsonage garden and the wind that half blew her back from the door. Everything within doors was warm and welcoming, though, and scrupulously clean and tidy; Miss Brontë was clearly very particular, and anything out of place would have annoyed her sense of order.
The romance of the place, and of Miss Brontë’s tragic life, struck Gaskell very forcibly and seems to have excited in her the possibility of writing about it all one day. The extraordinary detail of her letter to Forster, and of those to other friends such as Catherine Winkworth and Emma Shaen on the same subject, certainly looks like the salting-down of impressions, and Gaskell did in fact use parts of her own letters almost verbatim in the biography she eventually wrote three years later. The essence of that book is already present in her description to Forster of the wind “piping & wailing and sobbing round the square unsheltered house in a very strange unearthly way,” of Mr. Brontë’s queer formality and habit of dining alone “(fancy it! only they two left),” of his habit of putting a loaded pistol in his pocket “just as regularly as he puts on his watch. There was this little deadly pistol sitting down to breakfast with us, kneeling down to prayers at night—to say nothing of a loaded gun hanging up on high ready to pop off on the slightest emergency.” There was the sensual appeal of the place too, so evocative of the sisters’ untamed spirits. “Before tea we had a long, delicious walk,” Gaskell reported,
right against the wind on Penistone Moor which stretches directly behind the Parsonage going over the hill in brown & purple sweeps and falling softly down into a little upland valley through which a “beck” ran; & beyond again was another great waving hill,—and in the dip of that might be seen another yet more distant, & beyond that she said Lancashire came; but the sinuous hills seemed to girdle the world like the great Norse serpent, & for my part I don’t know if they don’t stretch up to the North Pole.
Elizabeth Gaskell wasn’t to know it at this point, but Charlotte had taken her to her sisters’ favourite spot, “The Meeting of the Waters.” Coming back across the moor, Charlotte showed her some of the desolate farms and told stories that thrilled her friend, “such wild tales of the ungovernable families, who lived or had lived therein that Wuthering Heights even seemed tame comparatively.” She also pointed out several newly built churches in the distance, places “which her Irish curates see after.”
Having such an eager, intelligent friend was remarkably like a return of sibling warmth and affection, and the two women stayed up late talking every night, for Charlotte’s life-circumstances fascinated her guest. Elizabeth Gaskell saw the family graves in the church and spoke to Tabby and to Martha about Emily and Anne, whose portrait by Branwell she was shown.
Tabby says since they were little bairns Miss Brontë & Miss Emily & Miss Anne used to put away their sewing after prayers, [“]& walk all three one after the other round the table in the parlour till near eleven o’clock. Miss Emily walked as long as she could; & when she died Miss Anne & Miss Brontë took it up,—and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone.” And on enquiring I found that after Miss Brontë had seen me to my room, she did come down every night, & begin that slow monotonous incessant walk in which I am sure I should fancy I heard the steps of the dead following me.
Charlotte must have found comfort in having these sad secret habits shared at last with an astute and loving friend.
Charlotte confided in Elizabeth Gaskell about Arthur Nicholls too, and must have told her that he had come back to Haworth earlier that month, hoping to revive his suit, and that he had been writing to her occasionally. Although it disturbed Charlotte to be withholding this news from her father, she clearly welcomed the return of interest from Nicholls, and the chance to make up for the pain of his departure in June. Elizabeth Gaskell felt emboldened to go behind her back, when she returned to Manchester, with an initiative to improve Nicholls’s income and prospects, and make him more appealing to Patrick Brontë as a son-in-law. Swearing him to secrecy, she enlisted the help of her friend Richard Monckton Milnes, who, in January 1854, under the auspices of the Vicar of Leeds, travelled to Kirk Smeaton to offer the curate two posts, one in Scotland and one in Lancashire. Milnes reported back to Mrs. Gaskell that Charlotte Brontë’s would-be spouse was “a strong-built, somewhat hard-featured man, with a good deal of Celtic sentiment about his manner & voice—quite of the type of the Northern Irishmen,” but that he had seemed despondent, “sadly broken in health & spirits,” and had refused both the proffered jobs. Nicholls was privately puzzled by the visit, as he had no idea who Milnes was, or that strings were being pulled on his behalf. But, putting two and two together, he must have been encouraged by the idea that his situation had been noted, and that Charlotte was somehow involved. He lost no time in pressing to be allowed to visit her again.
Charlotte received this renewal of Nicholls’s suit in a very different mood from that of the previous year. She had, in effect, decided to marry him. In the intervening months between Elizabeth Gaskell’s visit and Monckton Milnes’s visit to Kirk Smeaton, Charlotte’s unhappiness about George Smith had come to a head. His (relative) neglect of her all through 1853 made her suspicious that someone had taken over his affections, and she may have heard rumours about Miss Blakeway, for when she was planning a business trip to London in the autumn—ostensibly to sort out her investments, but cancelled casually, so perhaps it was not very urgent—she pointedly let him know she expected to stay in rented accommodation this time. When this provoked an ambiguous response, written on mourning stationery, Charlotte wrote to his mother for an explanation, and was told that the mourning was for an elderly relation, but hinted that George had joyous news to impart and bright prospects: indeed, he was going to be married.
Charlotte’s response was not to her credit, but shows the degree to which she had deluded herself, both about her real feelings for Smith (not sisterly at all) and about the reasonableness of being able to monopolise a part, however small, of his heart, as she had demanded. That she felt betrayed by his engagement is clear from the curt and ambiguously worded note that she sent: “My dear Sir, In great happiness, as in great grief—words of sympathy should be few. Accept my meed of congratulation—and believe me Sincerely yours, C. Brontë.” Worse still, she felt impelled to send Williams an even more offensive message, sending back one of the firm’s generous boxes of books with the wish that he not trouble to send any more. “These courtesies must cease some day—and I would rather give them up than wear them out.” Smith of course understood the subtext of these letters very well: he made an acute reference to them fifty years later in his “Recollections” when he said that Miss Brontë “afterwards wrote more at length on the same subject, when informing me of her engagement to Mr. Nicholls.”
So Charlotte’s change of heart towards Nicholls, or rather towards marriage with him, had an air of calculation about it, of assessing what her options were in a changed landscape. Once she had made up her mind, the obstacles that seemed so insuperable before fell away with relative ease. The main one was of course Papa’s consent, to which end Charlotte challenged him with quiet but irresistible force, as she recounted to Elizabeth Gaskell later, who found the imagined scene “really fine”: “She said ‘Father I am not a young girl, not a young woman even—I never was pretty. I now am ugly. At your death I shall have 300£ besides the little I have earned myself—do you think there are many men who would serve seven years for me?” To his renewed objections about Nicholls’s unworthiness and lack of status, she said, “I must marry a curate if I marry at all; not merely a curate but your curate,” adding that since she could never leave her father, they would all need to live together in one house. This was meant to be conciliatory, but Patrick Brontë’s pride was stung to the quick. He refused point blank to consider having “another man in this house,” stalked out of the room and wouldn’t talk to his daughter for a week. Only when poor old ill Tabby confronted him with the harm he was doing to Charlotte, and asked “if he wished to kill his daughter?,” did the intransigent old man begin to reconsider.
Nicholls had permission then to come to stay for ten days with his friend Sowden at Oxenhope and walk over every day to meet Charlotte. This was the first time, after almost nine years’ acquaintance, that they had the opportunity to get to know each other closely. Nicholls’s ardour and faithfulness were very touching, and his willingness to do whatever was necessary to consider the needs of Reverend Brontë won Charlotte’s especial admiration. At times he must have wondered which of the two—father or daughter—was being courted. By early April 1854, Charlotte was able to tell Ellen, in the first letter since their quarrel the previous July, that her father’s consent had at last been gained, and some degree of respect too: “for Mr. Nicholls has in all things proved himself disinterested and forbearing. He has shewn too that while his feelings are exquisitely keen—he can freely forgive. Certainly I must respect him—nor can I withhold from him more than mere cool respect. In fact, dear Ellen, I am engaged.” The humorous throwaway is similar to Jane Eyre’s famous announcement of her happy ending, Reader, I married him, but the degree of passion behind it startlingly different.
When Nicholls proposed the first time, it had only been the parallel with her own one-sided passion for Heger that shocked Charlotte into the recognition that his secret feelings might merit her attention. She remained quite detached and resolutely unsentimental (in accounts to friends at least) all through her engagement. When she went to visit Elizabeth Gaskell in May, Charlotte had a long intimate talk with Catherine Winkworth about her situation and told her, “[I]t has cost me a good deal to come to this…I cannot conceal from myself that he is not intellectual; there are many places into which he could not follow me intellectually.” Then when “Lily” (Mrs. Gaskell) came in, she said again that, though she felt very confident about Nicholls’s reliability and love for her, she feared that “such a character would be far less amusing and interesting than a more impulsive and fickle one; it might be dull!” The creator of Edward Rochester and Paul Emanuel might well say so. It made the two other women uncomfortable to hear Miss Brontë talk so baldly about her husband-to-be, and Catherine attempted to lighten the moment by saying that Charlotte would at least have the chance to “do the fickleness” herself, which made them all laugh. Charlotte sounded even less enamoured when she explained her feelings to Ellen: “I am still very calm—very—inexpectant,” she said, employing a suitably peculiar word. “Providence offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the best for me.”
It is clear that Patrick Brontë must have pictured Nicholls as a sort of gold-digger, or Charlotte would not have made such careful provision in a marriage settlement dated 24 May 1854 to protect her assets from her husband. This pre-nuptial arrangement was devised to circumvent the normal fate of a married woman’s property at that date, which was to fall to the husband’s control; Charlotte’s money—a tidy sum of £1,678.9s.9d., derived from her earnings as a writer and the residue of Aunt Branwell’s legacies—was to be ring-fenced for her sole use during her lifetime and left to her father if she predeceased Nicholls without issue. This left Nicholls with no claim on her money whatever, and that he agreed to the scheme willingly proves how disinterested his motives in marrying Charlotte really were. One hopes Patrick Brontë felt uncomfortable at the sight. Joe Taylor was to be the sole trustee.
At home in Haworth, waiting to be married, Charlotte existed in a lonely, abstract state, just at a time when she might have hoped to be feeling happy and triumphant. Relief at placating her father and devising a plan that suited him seemed more dominant than her own feelings, so thoroughly had she interiorised his needs. But whose anger did she really dread more, one wonders, his or her own? When he had almost burst a blood vessel over Nicholls’s decorous first approaches, Charlotte had rightly seen his reactions as ludicrous at some level. It had changed her course of action, but it hadn’t changed her mind—if anything such displays gave her an insight into what she really wanted to do.
—
THE WEDDING WENT AHEAD more quickly than Charlotte expected, or even wanted, partly due to the ill-will of the departing temporary curate, George de Renzy, who demanded an early release from duty. The ceremony was to be an exceptionally quiet affair. Charlotte had cards printed to send to a dozen or so close friends, but only two were invited to the wedding itself: Ellen and Miss Wooler. The latter proved her kindness and usefulness in a crisis when, at the last minute, Patrick Brontë announced that he was not going to be able to attend the service, or give the bride away as planned. A hurried consultation of the Prayer Book showed that “a friend” could do that office, so Miss Wooler stepped in kindly and acted as parent in Reverend Brontë’s stead.
So Charlotte rose early on 29 June, a Thursday, got dressed in her tiered, unshowy white muslin dress and delicately embroidered bonnet and veil,*3 and went to her wedding at eight o’clock in the morning, looking “like a snowdrop,” as one of the few locals who saw her walk to the church remarked. Nicholls’s friend Sutcliffe Sowden took the service, and the only other people present were Nicholls’s friend Joseph Grant, the churchwarden Mr. Redman and, presumably, Tabby and Martha. The event passed off every bit as quietly as the bride had wished.
The newly-weds left the Parsonage straight after the wedding breakfast, travelling by train from Keighley to Conwy in north Wales, where they spent their wedding night at an inn close to the spectacular ruins of the thirteenth-century castle. Their route along the north Wales coast to Holyhead during the next week took in some of the great picturesque sights: Snowdon, Conwy Bay, Penrhyn Castle and the grand sweep of the Menai Strait near Bangor, exactly the sort of views Charlotte had spent her youth and ruined her eyesight copying from engravings in books and periodicals—now they all sprang to life vividly before her. Nicholls had chosen their itinerary well, with a drive around Snowdon along the Pass of Llanberis, which “surpassed anything I remember of the English Lakes,” as Charlotte wrote to Catherine Wooler. They almost certainly also saw Caernarfon on their way back from Beddgelert to cross the bridge over to Anglesey, and—from the Conwy-to-Bangor train—the mountain at Penmaenmawr that had inspired a melancholy poem by Branwell on his visit to north Wales in 1845.
Crossing by steamer from Holyhead to Dublin, they were met at the dock by Nicholls’s elder brother Alan, an engineer in charge of the Grand Canal from Dublin to Banagher, and two of his cousins, Joseph Bell, a 23-year-old student at Trinity College, and Mary Anna Bell, “a pretty lady-like girl with gentle English manners.” Charlotte’s prejudices against Ireland and the Irish had to be rapidly abandoned: Arthur’s relations made a charming group, refined and courteous, and almost everything about the country struck her with pleasant surprise. After two days in Dublin, seeing the university and its library, museums and churches, the party travelled together back to Banagher, home to the younger Bells and former home of the Nicholls brothers, both of whom had been adopted into their uncle’s family in childhood. Cuba House, where the Royal School had been housed since 1818, was on the eastern edge of the town, the first property on the road as it came in from Parsonstown. A carriage had been sent out to the station to meet them—quite a step up in gentility from the rented fly or four-mile walk facing travellers to Haworth—and Charlotte was amazed by her husband’s former home as it came into view up the tree-lined drive. Grey stone, four-square and handsomely pedimented, it looked remarkably “like a gentleman’s country-seat.”
Inside, the house was rather gaunt, in the provincial Irish manner: “the passages look desolate and bare,” Charlotte reported to Miss Wooler; “our bed-room, a great room on the ground floor would have looked gloomy when we were shown into it but for the turf-fire that was burning in the wide old chimney.” But the reception rooms were spacious and comfortable, and the lady of the house, Arthur’s aunt Harriette, a hostess exactly to Charlotte’s taste, “quiet, kind and well-bred…like an English or Scotch Matron.” Again, Charlotte seemed unwilling to admit much Irishness here, or in the “English order and repose” of the household arrangements: “It seems [Mrs. Bell] was brought up in London.”*4
The renowned Banagher Royal Free School, which must have been in recess during Charlotte’s visit that July, was housed in buildings adjacent to Cuba House*5 and had been run by Mrs. Bell’s late husband, Dr. Allan Bell, LLD, until his death in 1839, and latterly by her son James Adamson Bell. The Bells’ own five sons and their nephews Alan and Arthur Nicholls had been educated there and all had gone on to Trinity College, making an impressively learned and cultivated group.
“I must say I like my new relations,” Charlotte reported to Miss Wooler. “My dear husband too appears in a new light here in his own country. More than once I have had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides. Some of the old servants and followers of the family tell me I am a most fortunate person for that I have got one of the best gentlemen in the country. His Aunt too speaks of him with a mixture of affection and respect most gratifying to hear.” Charlotte was seeing Nicholls’s virtues complete for the first time, and was humbled by them: “I pray to be enabled to repay as I ought the affectionate devotion of a truthful, honourable, unboastful man.” The degree to which her husband had been “unboastful” was probably the most striking thing of all. Patrick Brontë’s snobbery about Nicholls and mean-spirited antagonism seemed all the more outrageous in the context of Cuba House and its gentle denizens.
The couple stayed in Banagher for about a week, then moved on down the course of the Shannon to Limerick and on to Kilkee, a favoured bathing-spot on the west coast, “such a wild, iron-bound coast—with such an ocean-view as I had not yet seen—and such battling of waves with rocks as I had never imagined.” Here, Nicholls passed another test, of great importance. When they went out on to the cliffs on their first morning, Charlotte was so enthralled by the view that she needed to be alone with it, to “take the matter in my own way,” as she expressed it in a letter to Catherine Winkworth: “I did not want to talk—but I did want to look and be silent.” Nicholls intuited this, and left her alone, covering her lap with a rug against the spray. “He only interrupted me when he thought I crept too near the edge of the cliff…this protection which does not interfere or pretend—is I believe a thousand times better than any half sort of pseudo sympathy.”
Their tour continued across the mouth of the Shannon to Tarbert, then inland to Killarney, where Charlotte had a near-miss with death in the Gap of Dunloe, a spectacular mountain path about six miles long that links five lakes along the River Loe. Arthur was on foot and Charlotte on a hired pony when they came to a rough and narrow part of the track, at which place their guide advised Charlotte to dismount. Uncharacteristically, Charlotte ignored the warning and had got past the difficult section when the pony became unnerved and suddenly “seemed to go mad—reared, plunged.” Charlotte was thrown off, unnoticed by Nicholls, who was trying to lead the animal along. “I saw and felt her kick, plunge, trample round me,” Charlotte recalled dramatically, seeing her own death swooping near. “I had my thoughts about the moment—its consequences—my husband—my father.”
This vision of her own mortality jolted Charlotte more than the fall itself. It also released intense anxieties about her father, left alone in Haworth for a month by this point, and the very next day she persuaded Nicholls to cut short the rest of their honeymoon and start home. Perhaps there had been a letter from Patrick Brontë at one of their stops along the way, as Charlotte told Ellen “Papa has not been well” and that she had started “longing, longing intensely” to get back to him. Once she had begun to feel her familiar terrors about Papa’s health and well-being, “I could enjoy and rest no more.”
Her own cough, which was ostensibly one reason for going home, cleared up before they left Ireland, and soon after they got back to Haworth, on 1 August, Patrick Brontë became perfectly well too. “The wish for his continued life—together with a certain solicitude for his happiness and health seems—I scarcely know why—stronger in me now than before I was married,” she told Miss Wooler.
The odd trio then settled down to life together at the Parsonage. Patrick Brontë rarely took services any more or emerged from his study. Mrs. Gaskell asked what he could possibly have been doing in there all day, and it is a good question. Nicholls strove to spare him any exertion, much to his wife’s approval. “Each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice—I feel comforted to think that this marriage has secured Papa good aid in his old age.”
Papa had his study; Nicholls had a den made out of the former peat-room, given a coat of paint and a covering of sprigged wallpaper; and Charlotte, as before, had the dining room to work in. But the work she did in it was very different now that her circumstances had changed. As the wife of the curate, Charlotte knew a level of busyness unprecedented in her life: visiting parishioners and the sick, offering and receiving teas and suppers, writing letters on behalf of her husband and organising charitable initiatives. Britain entered the war against Russia in March of that year, when the combined British and French fleet had already been in the Black Sea for three months, and the hard campaign in the Crimean winter, military setbacks and disease were reported back to the British public in more graphic detail than ever before through William Howard Russell’s famous dispatches to The Times, the first war reporting of its sort in the age of telegraphy. The effect on public opinion was immediate and profound, and Haworth followed much of the country in holding meetings to help the Patriotic Fund, set up to help the families of the many casualties. Charlotte’s own response to the war showed how she had lost all her youthful zest for militarism: she told Margaret Wooler that she felt war was “one of the greatest curses that can fall upon mankind…no glory to be gained can compensate for the sufferings which must be endured.”
Marriage certainly suited Nicholls. “[M]y husband flourishes,” she told Ellen; “he begins indeed to express some slight alarm at the growing improvement in his condition. I think I am decent—better certainly than I was two months ago, but people don’t compliment me as they do Arthur—excuse the name—it has grown natural to use it now.” “People” would have been looking out for indicators of Charlotte’s well-being, signs of bridal shock or pleasure, and of the early signs of pregnancy, so their lack of compliments seems significant.
There is a photograph that is supposed to illustrate Charlotte’s married contentment, and that some people guess was taken on her honeymoon, but that cannot be of Charlotte Brontë. Two copies of this carte de visite exist, neither bearing any studio or production information. One is marked in ink on the reverse, in Ellen Nussey’s hand, “Within a year of C. B.’s death”; the other in pencil, in an unknown hand, “Miss Ellen Nussey, friend of Charlotte Brontë, c. 1860.” This leaves little doubt that it is a picture of Ellen Nussey.*6
Ellen herself said, when asked by T. Wemyss Reid if there was a photograph of Charlotte to use as a frontispiece for his projected biography, “I am afraid there is not any portrait of Charlotte Brontë but the one by Richmond—I never heard or saw any other that I remember—There was a painting in oils of Emily & Anne by Branwell when a boy, but it was a very poor picture even as regarded [sic] likeness, which sometimes is good, when the painting is very bad.”
Though there may be no photographic evidence of Charlotte’s contentment in these short months of marriage, her letters are full of it, and of her gratitude to “dear Arthur” and pleasure in his companionship. “I did not expect perfection,” she said with great philosophy, and as the months went by her feelings for Nicholls deepened and her appreciation of his character gave her unsought pleasure. Papa was “settled and content”—which was half the battle won—and her own life too: “May God make me thankful for it! I have a good, kind, attached husband, and every day makes my own attachment to him stronger.” It was hardly, though, the passionate meeting of “true souls” that her novels—and her sisters’ novels—blazoned as the highest goal of the emotional life, and the birthright of every free-spirited woman, regardless of birth, class or looks. Charlotte Brontë had, in some respects, given her imaginative life over to her readers for them to foster and enjoy; she had found she couldn’t live it herself, only write it.
It was also not a situation that promised well for her writing. In the change of tempo and focus, she had all but given up her work. Nicholls told George Smith about an evening, late in 1854, when he and Charlotte had been sitting together by the fire in the dining room, as the wind howled round the house in truly wuthering fashion, when she suddenly said, “If you had not been with me I must have been writing now.” Did she mean this regretfully, or simply as an introduction to what she did next, which was to go upstairs—“run” as Nicholls recalled—and fetch “the beginning of her New Tale”? More for the pleasure it might give herself, one feels, than to hear or solicit her husband’s criticisms, she read him a pencilled manuscript of about 7,000 words, the fragment known as “Emma,” at the end of which Nicholls ventured to say, “The Critics will accuse you of repetition, as you have again introduced a school.” “O I shall alter that,” she replied unconcernedly. “I always begin two or three times before I can please myself.” It’s an interesting insight into how Charlotte Brontë composed her novels, expecting “always” to go through several false starts and diversions, and a sad last glimpse at her as a writer, for no more work got done on “Emma.”
“Emma” is narrated by a childless widow called Mrs. Chalfont, whose relation to the story is never revealed and whose usefulness as a device runs out almost immediately. A man called Ellin also appears (the same name as in Charlotte’s “two brothers” fragment of 1853), a deliberately enigmatic character, who might have been intended to act as a sort of amateur detective within a “puzzle” plot. The tone is light and satirical, quite like Thackeray, in fact, and the school plot that Nicholls felt might be repetitive sounds more like the seminary at the beginning of Vanity Fair than anything out of Charlotte’s own experience. “Emma” herself never appears.
With the recession of her writer-self, everything in the familiar home changed. There were other momentous changes too, as Charlotte tried to convey to Ellen in an oblique letter that hints at her newly acquired knowledge of sex:
during the last 6 weeks—the colour of my thoughts is a good deal changed: I know more of the realities of life than I once did. I think many false ideas are propagated—perhaps unintentionally. I think those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintance to marry—much to blame. For my part—I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance—what I always said in theory—Wait God’s will. Indeed—indeed Nell—it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man’s lot is far—far different.
By the end of 1854, Charlotte’s London friendships had all but dried up; there were no more letters from Williams, none from Smith. Life concentrated in and around the Parsonage, and Charlotte’s days were taken up with parish matters, teas, visiting, organising. Ellen visited once in the autumn of 1854, but the old intimacy was hard to re-establish under the new order, and Ellen liked Mr. Nicholls no better than she had before, indeed rather worse.
Charlotte had come to admire Nicholls’s friend Sutcliffe Sowden and was hoping that he and Ellen might start to admire each other too. A marriage between Ellen and her husband’s best friend would have been perfect from Charlotte’s point of view, like the end of a comedy—a drawing-together of allegiances, and protection perhaps against Charlotte and Ellen drifting apart. But Charlotte was above outright matchmaking, and her hints came to nothing. Ellen, meanwhile, cannot have been pleased to receive letters from Charlotte including what “Arthur” felt on various subjects that had only recently become his business, such as the behaviour of Joe and Amelia Taylor, and her own situation. “[Arthur] often says he wishes you were well settled in life,” Charlotte wrote on 11 October, not very sensitively. In the next letter from the Parsonage, it became clear that Nicholls didn’t just feel empowered to intrude his opinion but was actually reading Charlotte’s letter over her shoulder, and not much liking what he saw. Nicholls was impatient to go out on a walk and his wife’s lingering over the writing desk provoked him to say something that must have been on his mind for a while. Charlotte’s letter captures the essence of the conversation that started up as she wrote:
Arthur has just been glancing over this note—He thinks I have written too freely about Amelia &c. Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication—they always seem to think us incautious. I’m sure I don’t think I have said anything rash—however you must burn [three underlines] it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine never ought to be kept—they are dangerous as lucifer matches—so be sure to follow a recommendation he has just given “fire them”—or “there will be no more.” Such is his resolve. I can’t help laughing—this seems to me so funny, Arthur however says he is quite serious and looks it, I assure you—he is bending over the desk with his eyes full of concern. I am now desired “to have done with it—” so with his kind regards and mine—Good-bye dear Ellen.
“Fire them” was less a recommendation than an order, from a man who certainly seems every inch the conventional Victorian husband on this occasion, as Charlotte seems the wife. Her protestations that she found it all terribly funny sit rather oddly with the insistence that her husband is serious, and must have confused Ellen (or bored her), because ten days later Charlotte had to send a much more explicit restatement:
Dear Ellen—Arthur complains that you do not distinctly promise to burn my letters as you receive them. He says you must give him a plain pledge to that effect—or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence.
He says women are most rash in letter-writing—they think only of the trustworthiness of their immediate friend—and do not look to contingencies—a letter may fall into any hand. You must give the promise—I believe—at least he says so, with his best regards—or else you will get such notes as he writes to Mr. Sowden—plain, brief statements of facts without the adornment of a single flourish.
Ellen did as was requested—almost. Sensing trouble ahead, she made a copy of the pledge she addressed sardonically “To the Revd. The Magister”:*7
As you seem to hold in great horror the ardentia verba of feminine epistles, I pledge myself to the destruction of Charlotte’s epistles henceforth, if You, pledge yourself to no censorship in the matter communicated[.]
This seems to have satisfied Nicholls, who passed on his thanks via Charlotte. “We may now write any dangerous stuff we please to each other,” Charlotte reported; “it is not ‘old friends’ he mistrusts, but the chances of war—the accidental passing of letters into hands and under eyes for which they were never written.” It seems fairly certain that what Nicholls feared was less the general impropriety of private correspondence falling into the wrong hands than the fact that the correspondence in question was Currer Bell’s. Having a much better sense of her local celebrity than either Patrick or Charlotte, Nicholls may have understood better than they the need to protect his wife’s privacy. That this had hardly occurred to Charlotte before is borne out by her comment to Ellen: “Strange chances do fall out certainly. As to my own notes I never thought of attaching importance to them, or considering their fate—till Arthur seemed to reflect on both so seriously.”
After Charlotte’s death, Nicholls resisted all attempts at publicity, and agreed to the commissioning of Mrs. Gaskell’s biography only under duress. He preserved many of Charlotte’s manuscripts and mementoes as an act of private homage to a woman he remained intensely devoted to, but very few personal letters survive that were written to Charlotte and only one of hers to him (the preservation of which seems accidental), and we have to assume that either she destroyed them herself, or that her widower did, in line with his stated policy. Since her correspondents included Thackeray, W. S. Williams, Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, this is a cause for deep regret to posterity, however understandable and even admirable it was from Nicholls’s point of view.
Very few letters of Charlotte Brontë would have come down to us if Ellen Nussey had kept her side of the bargain, but she didn’t. On her copy of the promise she wrote later, in pencil, “Mr. N continued his censorship so the pledge was void.” This was obviously a self-justifying manoeuvre, since no censorship by Charlotte’s husband is evident in anything she sent subsequently, and after his sudden laying down of the law, he doesn’t seem to have mentioned the matter again. How misplaced his trust had been came to light only in the decades following Charlotte’s death, when Ellen became very keen to publicise and publish her correspondence from the increasingly famous and revered author. Censorship then really did take place, but of a retroactive kind, and by Ellen, who made many deletions and adjustments to anything that might have shown herself in a bad light. In Charlotte’s second letter about the “pledge,” for instance, Ellen substituted the words “Arthur wishes you would burn my letters” for “Arthur thanks you for the promise,” and suppressed the passage “we may now write any dangerous stuff we please,” to make it look as if Nicholls really had invalidated the agreement. “[H]e never did give the pledge,” Ellen wrote in pencil as a footnote.*8
—
SIR JAMES KAY-SHUTTLEWORTH invited himself to visit Haworth in the winter of 1854 and had a scheme in mind for the Nichollses, a living near Gawthorpe worth £200 a year. Nicholls could not accept, out of deference to the needs of Patrick Brontë, a matter “of course” in Charlotte’s eyes, but they did not want to dissuade Sir James entirely. Charlotte had a pipe-dream of her own, which was that Sutcliffe Sowden might benefit from this lucrative position. Partly to keep this possibility open, and partly because of the social pressure that always came to bear on invitations from the Kay-Shuttleworths, Charlotte and Arthur agreed to go to Gawthorpe in the new year. This was despite the fact that Charlotte had been putting off all her other friends’ invitations for months and would much rather have gone to the Gaskells at Plymouth Grove—or to Brookroyd, if it hadn’t been for a typhus outbreak in the area. It had been a hard Christmas: Tabby was so ill with diarrhoea that she was moved to her great-niece’s house to be nursed, and Charlotte had been anxiously seeking advice and medicine on her behalf from the local surgeon, Amos Ingham.
Within a few days of her return from Gawthorpe, Charlotte herself began to feel sick. “Don’t conjecture—dear Nell,” she wrote to Ellen, clearly thinking she could be pregnant, “for it is too soon yet—though I certainly never before felt as I have done lately. But keep the matter wholly to yourself—for I can come to no decided opinion at present.” She added that she had been feeling very well until this turn of events: “I am rather mortified to lose my good looks and grow thin as I am doing.”
The terrible symptoms that Charlotte suffered in the last three months of her life have led people, very naturally, to think that the cause of her death was the thing she had been fearing so long, consumption, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. That Charlotte really was pregnant in the early months of 1855 is clear from letters such as hers to Ellen, above, and from the evidence of Mrs. Gaskell’s Life, which puts the matter politely but explicitly by giving the doctor’s opinion that there was “a natural cause” for the sickness that time would cure, and later by mentioning “the baby that was coming.” The severity of Charlotte’s physical distress, though, did not seem to match “morning sickness” as it is normally understood, and so consumption has often crept back into people’s speculations about Charlotte Brontë’s death as an extra factor. Mrs. Gaskell’s linking of Charlotte’s last illness with a lingering cold, contracted “by a long walk over damp ground in thin shoes,” encourages this idea, as if “morning sickness” alone was not enough. The coughing up of blood also confuses the issue, though, in Charlotte’s case, the blood almost certainly came from the stomach, not the lungs.
It is only very recently, with the publicity given to the condition called hyperemesis gravidarum by one famous contemporary sufferer, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton), that the cause of Charlotte Brontë’s death can be fully appreciated. “HG,” as it is sometimes known, is an extreme reaction to the hormones of pregnancy that affects around 0.5–2.0 per cent of pregnant women, with varying degrees of severity and for varying lengths of time (some sufferers endure the symptoms for the whole forty weeks; more often the condition improves after the first trimester). Unlike the commonly experienced symptoms of ordinary morning sickness—nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light, smells and sounds—the HG sufferer experiences a violent and ceaseless disruption of stomach and senses. One very vivid recent account in a newspaper, by Sarah Button, describes what it can be like. Three days after her pregnancy was confirmed, she relates, nausea kicked in “so aggressively that it was as if I’d run headfirst into a brick wall…at four weeks pregnant, I felt as if I’d been poisoned.” Button describes how, even with all the assistance that modern medicine allows (drugs and a drip are required constantly to prevent renal failure, dehydration and collapse of the major organs due to malnutrition), she was sick fifty times in one day and brought up blood from the traumatised stomach lining: “It was as if someone had taken over my body. I couldn’t imagine ever feeling normal again.” Her case was so severe that by week nine choices narrowed to a potentially harmful course of steroids or a termination: Button anxiously chose the steroids and in due course gave birth to a healthy baby, but was incapacitated by sickness right up to the end of the pregnancy.
Charlotte Brontë’s sufferings, in an age with so little knowledge of this condition and with so few weapons to fight it, can be contemplated only with the deepest pity. The vomiting that everyone hoped and expected would subside in time got worse, and the patient weaker. “She, who was ever patient in illness, tried hard to bear up and bear on. But the dreadful sickness increased and increased, till the very sight of food occasioned nausea,” Gaskell wrote in the account she drew up later, based on the witness of Arthur Nicholls, Reverend Brontë and Martha Brown. At the time, Gaskell knew nothing of Charlotte’s condition or plight and later bitterly lamented that she had not been able to help; indeed there is a suggestion, in what she said later in a letter to Catherine Winkworth, that she understood Charlotte’s life could have been saved—perhaps by a termination of the pregnancy: “I do fancy that if I had come, I could have induced her—even though they had all felt angry with me at first—to do what was so absolutely necessary for her very life.” But, while Charlotte was bedridden and writhing in agony day and night, there was no one on hand in Haworth able or willing to say this.
Martha tried to cheer her mistress with the thought of the child, but it was hard for Charlotte to rally. “I dare say I shall be glad sometime,” she told the faithful servant, “but I am so ill—so weary.” She was hardly eating a thing, and being sick constantly. Arthur had to send notes of apology that his wife was currently unable to attend to business, although at the beginning of February they still assumed the trouble would pass in time. Dr. MacTurk, the senior physician at Bradford Infirmary (the best available local doctor), was of the opinion that “in a few weeks she will be well again.” But in a few weeks she was worse. “Let me speak the plain truth,” Charlotte scratched in a message to Amelia Taylor, “my sufferings are very great—my nights indescribable—sickness with scarcely a reprieve—I strain until what I vomit is mixed with blood.”
From her sickbed, Charlotte wrote only a handful more letters. One, to Ellen, asked her to find out more about their mutual friend Mary Hewitt’s problematic pregnancy—“how long she was ill and in what way”—while to Amelia Taylor (the mother of baby Tim) she begged for any remedies she could recommend, “anything that will do good.” In each case, she gave touching accounts of her husband’s care of her, and her grateful love. “No kinder better husband than mine it seems to me can there be in the world,” she told Laetitia Wheelwright. “I do not want now for kind companionship in health and the tenderest nursing in sickness,” while in her letter to Ellen she called him “the best earthly comfort that ever woman had.” There could be no greater tribute to the flowering of her love for her “dear boy” Arthur.
In the middle of this awful ordeal, and during a winter of unusually severe cold, Charlotte had to report to Ellen “Our poor old Tabby is dead and buried.” Much to her sorrow and agitation she was too ill to attend the funeral of their beloved old friend, although perhaps she could have watched from the bedroom window as Tabby was buried within sight of the house. Charlotte must have by this time feared for her own survival, for on the same day that Tabby died, 17 February 1855, she made her will:
In case I die without issue I give and bequeath to my husband all my property to be his absolutely and entirely; but in case I leave issue I bequeath to my husband the interest of my property during his lifetime, and at his death I desire that the principal should go to my surviving Child, or Children, should there be more than one child, share and share alike.
Thus she overturned the cautious provision made in her marriage settlement, which kept her assets out of Nicholls’s hands. It was a sign of trust in her husband, now that Charlotte felt secure in his willingness to care for her father in the event of Charlotte predeceasing them both.
In the early weeks of March, with a slight improvement in the weather, Charlotte seemed to be improving slightly too. She took some beef tea, “spoonsful of wine & water—a mouthful of light pudding.” All in all, though, as Martha remarked, “a wren would have starved on what she ate.” In the last note she ever wrote, in the feeblest pencilled script, Charlotte characteristically asked after everyone else’s health, commiserated with everyone else’s troubles, expressed relief at Papa being well. She had not strength to do more. “I am reduced to greater weakness—the skeleton emaciation is the same &c. &c. &c. I cannot talk—even to my dear patient constant Arthur I can say but few words at once.” About a week before she died, there was a change: “a low wandering delirium came on,” in which the ravaged patient begged for food “and even for stimulants,” as Mrs. Gaskell was told. She came to briefly to the sound of prayers being said, and, seeing her husband’s stricken face, said, “Oh! I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.”
Patrick Brontë wrote to Ellen on Friday, 30 March, warning her that the doctors had given up hope of Charlotte’s recovery, “and we only to [sic] look forward to the solemn event, with prayer to God, that he will give us grace and Strength sufficient unto our day.” Ellen set off at once from Brookroyd when she received this, but got to Haworth too late: Charlotte had died in the early morning of 31 March, three weeks short of her thirty-ninth birthday. Martha Brown and her sister Tabitha were the only ones present at the death, Arthur Nicholls having gone to take a rest in an adjacent room. Tabitha at first thought the bereaved father was behaving in a strangely calm and controlled way, turning to leave the room with dry eyes and in silence, but came across him in his bedroom soon after, kneeling by his bed, “crying in agonized tones, ‘My poor Charlotte! My dear Charlotte!’ ” The local doctor, Amos Ingham, signed the death certificate. The cause he cited, “phthisis,” usually indicated the wasting caused by tuberculosis, but applied as accurately to the wasting that three months of dehydration and starvation had wreaked on Charlotte’s already feeble frame.
Patrick Brontë did not come out of his study when Ellen Nussey arrived, but sent a message asking her to stay for the interment, which took place on 4 April, Sutcliffe Sowden taking the service only eight months after he had officiated at the Nichollses’ wedding. Ellen and Martha put flowers and evergreens in the coffin with their friend’s ravaged corpse, and undoubtedly dressed her with special care, perhaps in one of her London outfits. One of the townsfolk who thronged to the church for the funeral and to see Mrs. Nicholls laid in the vault with her mother, aunt, brother and three sisters noticed that a violet ribbon was trapped in the coffin lid.*9
*1 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark novel, published in March 1852, was reputed to have sold more than a million copies in England that year, “nearly all of them pirated.” CB had read the book by September, when she recommended it to EN (LCB 3, 67 and 68 n2).
*2 CB changed the name of her protagonist from Lucy Snowe to Lucy Frost and back again while writing Villette.
*3 On show at the Brontë Parsonage Museum—a charming, and expensive-looking, object.
*4 Mrs. Bell had been to finishing school in London, for a few weeks only.
*5 Ruins of these buildings and the old coach house are still visible in the fields where Cuba House, now demolished, used to stand.
*6 Ellen Nussey lived long into the age of photography and became very keen on having her picture taken. Lined up next to later images (see the photograph section for an example), it certainly looks like the same person: well-fed, healthy, genteel, complacent. The writing of “Within a year of C. B.’s death” makes clear that the subject is not “C. B.”: “C. B. in the year before her death” is how Ellen would have labelled the picture if that were the case. Both cartes de visite are in the Brontë Society’s possession (Seton-Gordon Collection SG 109 and 109a).
The wishful identification of Charlotte Brontë as the subject seems to have arisen from the discovery in 1984 of a glass negative of the carte in the archives of the photographer Sir Emery Walker (see Susan R. Foister’s article “The Brontë Portraits,” BST 18:5 [1985] for the details of this discovery). It was labelled “from a carte-de-visite of Charlotte Brontë, taken within a year of her death,” following the suggestion of “Within a year of C. B.’s death” on the reverse of the image it duplicated. Walker had been commissioned to make the negative for the firm of Smith, Elder in 1918, long after anyone at the firm knew Charlotte Brontë personally and twenty-one years after Ellen Nussey’s death. Presumably the photograph was in Smith’s archive from his dealings with EN in the three decades during which she was trying to publish her Brontë material.
*7 I am assuming that the surviving text—at Texas University—is a copy made and kept by EN, because of the later pencil notes on it in her hand.
*8 I am indebted, as so often, to Margaret Smith’s footnotes and editorial matter for the information here about the letters. See LCB 3, 299 n3, and LCB 1, 43–52, for her detailed accounts of EN’s concealments.
*9 This tiny detail, so small it seems likely to be true, has come down in the family of the composer Robin Walker, whose great-great-grandfather saw it. See Betty Emmaline Walker, The Green Lanes: A Westmorland Childhood (York, 1998), pp. 149–50.