‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life:
and it ought not to be.’
This was the advice offered to the twenty-year-old Charlotte Brontë in 1837 by the then Poet Laureate Robert Southey, to whom she had written, with great deference, to ask his opinion on a selection of her poetry Within the letter, she expressed a desire ‘“to be forever known” as a poetess’, prompting Southey’s discouraging response. Replying to his letter, the young Charlotte resolved to adhere to the advice given, declaring earnestly, ‘I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I’ll look at Southey’s letter, and suppress it.’ Despite her resolve, however, she was ultimately to ignore Southey’s advice, and to pursue a career as a writer, producing one of the best-loved novels in the English language, and leaving behind a legacy that even her twenty-year-old self, who dreamed of literary success, can scarcely have imagined.
The exchange between Southey and Brontë is illustrative of a conflict that was to manifest itself in the author’s writing throughout her career, as she attempted to negotiate her position as both a woman and a writer at a time when strong prejudices against female authors prevailed: women, according to traditional conventions, produced children; men produced great literature. Southey’s letter offered an early insight into the potential reception of her work. As a woman, Brontë would not have her literary productions judged on the same basis as those of her male counterparts – a fact of which she was all too aware, and which caused her considerable anxiety. The woman writer had risen to prominence with the increasing popularity of the novel from the late eighteenth century onwards. The novel was persistently viewed as inferior to poetry, though attitudes shifted somewhat as the nineteenth century progressed, with writers such as George Eliot, Henry James and, to a lesser extent, Brontë herself contributing to the establishment of the novel as a legitimate art form. Nevertheless, it continued to be perceived as an appropriate vehicle for the woman writer, and Southey’s discouraging words are perhaps rooted in the notion that great poetry belonged strictly in the realm of the male writer. Brontë’s anxieties on this front were ultimately to prove unfounded: she has long been celebrated as one of the greatest authors of the Victorian period, and, significantly, was one of very few women writers from the period to infiltrate the male-dominated canon prior to the explosion of interest in women’s writing that accompanied the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Charlotte Brontë’s achievements are all the more significant given her relatively limited literary output. She published only a small selection of poems and three novels in her lifetime, with a fourth, The Professor (actually the first novel she wrote), published posthumously. Her letters, juvenilia and a fragment from an unfinished novel, Emma, also appeared in print after her death. Thus, while her name ranks alongside other Victorian literary greats such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray (to whom Jane Eyre is dedicated), George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, her literary output does not. She died at the age of just thirty-eight, at a time when she was arguably displaying her greatest maturity as a writer. That her reputation should rest on such a small number of published works is extraordinary; still more incredible is the fact that Brontë’s fame (in the popular imagination at least) rests predominantly on a single novel: Jane Eyre – a runaway success when it was first published in 1847, and never out of print since. Given her untimely death and limited output (she published less, even, than Jane Austen), her position as one of the literary giants of the Victorian period is truly remarkable.
If Brontë’s fiction continues to fascinate, so too does her personal life. Charlotte Brontë’s success story is extraordinary enough; that she should be one of three sisters to enjoy literary success is even more astonishing. The Brontë family were not wealthy; Patrick Brontë, Charlotte’s father, was a clergyman living in Yorkshire. His wife, Maria Brontë, died when Charlotte was just five years old. The sisters may have been well-educated women by the standards of the time, but nevertheless their schooling was limited. The fascination with the Brontës’ personal lives is undoubtedly partially rooted in the unlikelihood that one, let alone three literary geniuses should emerge from this rather obscure family, as well as in the tragedies that were to overtake them: Patrick Brontë lived to witness the deaths of all six of his children; Charlotte, at thirty-eight, was the longest lived. None of the six siblings left any known descendants (though there has been speculation that Branwell Brontë, Charlotte’s brother, may have fathered an illegitimate child). Their story is truly tragic and their literary achievements appear to take on new meaning in light of their brief lives.
The purpose of this addition to the genre of Brontë biography is to provide a short introduction to Charlotte Brontë’s life and work, and to consider some of the crucial issues relating to Brontë’s development as a writer – in particular, her relationship with her sisters, her struggle to break the mould of the ‘woman writer’ and her negotiation of the public and private spheres. In constructing a brief account of her life, I return to her own writing as the basis for this work – her letters, diary fragments and fiction. Brontë’s life, though somewhat short, was nevertheless rich: despite her relatively solitary life in Haworth (particularly after the death of her siblings), she corresponded with a large number of people, indicated by the fact that her collected letters total three substantial volumes. This book also seeks to examine the significance of the crucial relationship between what might be termed Brontë’s public and private selves. In her early biography of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after her subject’s death, Elizabeth Gaskell highlights this divide between Brontë’s public and personal lives, noting that ‘Charlotte Brontë’s existence [was] divided into two parallel currents – her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character – not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled.’ As Gaskell implies, the relationship between these two selves was far from straightforward: through her fiction Brontë made public, in a sense, many of her private experiences, while at the same time concealing her private self behind the pseudonym Currer Bell. Following the deaths of her siblings, she struggled to overcome her private feelings of grief and loneliness in order to continue in her professional role as author. The revelation of her true identity forced a renegotiation of the relationship between her private and public selves as interest in her life and background increased. Throughout her literary career she combined her role as writer with that of dutiful daughter (though Elisabeth Jay suggests that this image of Charlotte is one constructed at Gaskell’s discretion, noting that Brontë’s first biographer chose ‘to submerge Charlotte the writer in Charlotte the domestic saint’).1 Towards the end of her life, she took on the role of wife. Gender ideologies of the time dictated that there were separate spheres for men and women: men belonged to the public world of work; women to the private realm of home and hearth. Brontë demonstrated her awareness of this when she adopted her gender ambiguous pseudonym, and at times clearly struggled to negotiate her position within these two spheres.
The public fascination with the lives of the Brontës is largely responsible for the biographical tradition that has emerged and is partly fuelled by a desire to know the ‘real’ Charlotte Brontë -the private, rather than the public figure. However, though we might distinguish between Brontë’s ‘public’ writing, in the form of her published work, and her ‘private’ letters, both arguably entail a negation of the ‘real’ self: while the ‘mask’ of Currer Bell that Brontë adopted in order to publish her work is perhaps more evident than the mask she wears in her letters, there can be no question that she seeks to present an image that is not necessarily consistent with her true feelings in her letters as well as her fiction – as is arguably the case with all letters. Private diaries perhaps afford a clearer insight into a person’s world than letters, but there are very few papers of this kind authored by Charlotte Brontë (a notable exception being the fragments that survive from her time at Roe Head school). While some of her letters are undoubtedly candid in their revelations of her feelings, thoughts and desires, there can be little doubt that they also conceal aspects of her life. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is to be found in her letters to her lifelong friend, Ellen Nussey, whom she met at school at the age of fourteen. In a number of letters to Ellen, she expresses a desire that they might meet, in order to discuss issues that she would rather not allude to in a letter. Further, though the letters are indicative of a strong friendship between the two women, she concealed from Ellen her literary success, refusing to reveal herself as the author of Jane Eyre. Indeed, when rumour reached Ellen that Charlotte had authored a book, she was sternly rebuked by her friend, who vehemently denied that there was any truth in the rumour. The notion that Charlotte concealed aspects of herself from even those closest to her is further suggested in another letter written to Ellen in 1836, in which she declares, ‘I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I dare say despise me.’ The masks of Charlotte Brontë are, therefore, multiple. She appears, through her letters, her fiction and others’ accounts of her, as daughter, sister, friend, writer, and through these we are allowed glimpses into her world, but these various identities, though interlinked, are nevertheless disjointed, separate: we never quite see the complete woman. In this respect, the ‘real’ Charlotte Brontë remains elusive.
In spite of this, Charlotte Brontë and her family continue to fascinate, and the parallel interests in Brontë’s personal life and her work are undoubtedly partly rooted in the discernible links between them. In the Hesperus Press title Brief Lives: Jane Austen, Fiona Stafford notes the disparity between Austen’s life and fiction, stating that ‘the gap between what is known of her life and what is apparent in her fiction is […] clear.’ In the case of Charlotte Brontë, however, her personal experiences undoubtedly manifest themselves in her fiction. It is inevitably problematic to place too much emphasis on the significance of authors’ lives in relation to an understanding of their fictional works, to draw too many associations between writer and writing, to perceive a novel as a direct commentary on the life of the author, but, to some extent at least, Brontë must surely stand as an exception to this. Her life and fiction are replete with parallels: from the recurring figure of the absent mother in her novels, to the representation of her childhood experiences at Cowan Gate school in the Lowood scenes of Jane Eyre. The time she spent in Brussels, and in particular her relationship with and feelings for her teacher, M. Heger, provide source material for both The Professor and Villette, while her experiences as a teacher and governess assist in the portrayal of the protagonists’ experiences in Jane Eyre and Villette. The Yorkshire landscape is a repeated source of inspiration in her writing, while her religious upbringing by her curate father and her liberal education clearly inform her work. Friends, acquaintances and local history and anecdotes also serve as significant sources of inspiration in her writing. It is difficult, therefore, to overestimate the extent to which her fiction is infused with her own personal experiences. Indeed, so close were some of the characters in Shirley to their real life counterparts that those who knew them were able to identify them as such.
If Brontë’s fiction was influenced by her personal experiences, it was also influenced by her intense desire to succeed as a writer, and her awareness of the limitations placed on the woman writer. Throughout her career as an author, Brontë was perceptibly affected by reviewers’ responses to her work: stung by criticism, and initially frustrated by the speculation as to her identity – particularly that relating to her sex. Such anxieties are referenced not only in her letters – her private writing – but in her published works as well. The first chapter of her novel Shirley can be seen as a direct response to criticism of Jane Eyre as overly dramatic and sensational, while it was only her publisher’s refusal that prevented her from including a cutting response to Elizabeth Rigby’s review of Jane Eyre in the Preface to Shirley. It is easy enough to believe that some of this anxiety at least is rooted in Southey’s early response to her writing and her literary ambitions. One of my intentions, in this short biography is to examine the extent to which such anxieties manifested themselves in Brontë’s work, and influenced both her relationship with her sisters and her response to their work.
Brontë seems to have been constantly aware of the barriers that prevented her work from being judged on the same grounds as that of her male counterparts. In 1849, shortly after the publication of Shirley, she wrote to the critic G.H. Lewes on this subject, ‘I wish you did not think me a woman: I wish all reviewers believed “Currer Bell” to be a man – they would be more just to him. You will – I know – keep measuring me by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex – where I am not what you consider graceful – you will condemn me.’ Although Charlotte was critical of her sister Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, she would, undoubtedly, have agreed with one of the assertions made in the Preface, ‘If a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.’ She strove throughout her career to become not merely a successful woman writer, but a successful writer, whose accomplishments might be considered to rival those of her male contemporaries such as Dickens and Thackeray In terms of the number of novels published, she is clearly their inferior; in terms of reputation, some 155 years after her death, her work remains as popular as ever.