‘Dangerous as lucifer matches.’ This is how Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte Brontë’s husband for the last nine months of her life, described her letters (?20 October 1854). He asked Ellen Nussey, Brontë’s friend since schooldays and her most frequent correspondent, to promise that she would burn any she received. ‘Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication—they always seem to think us incautious,’ Brontë wrote to Ellen. She was amused rather than outraged, and Nicholls got his promise. Ellen exacted a promise in turn from Nicholls. She agreed to destroy any letters her friend would in future send her in return for his pledge not to censure what Brontë wrote. Ellen did not keep her promise, preserving almost four hundred letters from Brontë and expunging only a few passages when publication was in view.
All biographies of Charlotte Brontë, beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic and authorized life, rely on her letters. They are still our most direct source of information about the lives of the Brontës and our closest approach to the woman whose closing signature was C Brontë, then Currer Bell or C Bell, and finally C B Nicholls. Brontë was fortunate in her friendships, and the letters show us what fine company she could be. Like the novels, they are full of acute observations, pithy character sketches, and passionate convictions. By evoking congenial companionship across distances, they remind us of how profoundly Brontë needed it. This is the keynote of Gaskell’s biography, which takes a passage from ‘Aurora Leigh’ as its epigraph:
O my God,
——Thou hast knowledge, only Thou,
How dreary ’tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.
As herself a celebrated novelist as well as a wife and mother, Gaskell was well situated to appreciate the ways in which fame could amplify solitude. No wonder Brontë accepted Nicholls’s proposal of marriage without having begun by desiring it, and despite her father’s opposition to it.
Nicholls’s sensitivity about his wife’s letters and his proprietary view of them were standard in the period. Letters were private, and the opinions and judgements expressed in them were not meant for public distribution. ‘There is something peculiarly revolting in the bare idea of those communications being laid open to the public gaze, which were intended only for the eye of a confidential & sympathizing friend,’ Margaret Wooler reassured Nicholls, when he worried about indiscretions in the letters Brontë had sent her before her marriage.1 What then could justify their publication? Nicholls was adamant about not publishing anything that would detract from his wife’s reputation. Like Tennyson, when the idea of publishing Arthur Henry Hallam’s letters was mooted, he would have said, ‘I of all living men should be allowed a voice in this matter.’2
So far as Nicholls was concerned, quite a bit of what Brontë had written or would write seemed likely to detract from her reputation. When she read him the fragment now known as ‘Emma’, the beginning of a novel she was writing after Villette, he was discouraging: ‘The Critics will accuse you of repetition, as you have again introduced a school.’3 But Brontë was well acquainted with Nicholls’s limitations before she married him. He had been her father’s curate for eight years, and she was not only an astute judge of character but a woman without illusions about herself or her friends. Nicholls won her by loving her better, and more passionately, than anyone had. She had written to Ellen before the marriage that she believed him to be ‘conscientious’ and ‘high-principled’ and was determined not to ‘yield to regrets—that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts are not added . . .’ (11 April 1854). After the marriage, in the letter Nicholls found so dangerous, she remarks that he ‘is impatient for his walk’ and that she is ‘obliged to scrawl hurriedly’ (?20 October 1854). Her marriage left her less time for writing, novels as well as letters. Is her enthusiastic assertion of her own authority in the very next passage—‘When I go to Brookroyd if I hear Mr. C—or anybody else say anything to the disparagement of single women I shall go off like a bomb-shell’—unrelated to constraints she felt but didn’t object to as a happily married woman?
Ellen has importantly shaped our narrative of Brontë’s life and our sense of who Brontë was by keeping the letters her friend wrote to her between 1832, when Brontë was sixteen, and 1855, when she died, three weeks short of her thirty-ninth birthday. The portrait is clear enough yet partial, if only because different audiences elicit different performances. Brontë’s description of Ellen—‘good’, ‘faithful’, and ‘observant’ but entirely ‘without romance’ (3 January 1850)—also describes the letters she wrote to her. Brontë’s other longtime friend and regular correspondent, Mary Taylor, was very different from Ellen, but she destroyed all but one of Brontë’s letters to her. The author of a novel (published long after Brontë’s death) as well as a series of articles on the economic condition of women, Mary did not lack romance or the force of personality to write combatively to Brontë about her political views and her artistic and life choices. Letters from Mary, together with the letters Brontë certainly would have written to Anne, Emily, and Branwell during periods of separation, would have shown us a different Brontë. The eight letters to Emily that have survived provide insights into her heart and mind vastly different from those provided by her letters to Ellen.
From Upperwood House, where Brontë worked briefly as a governess, one of her letters to Ellen precisely registers the difference between her connections to Ellen and Mary. Mary had preceded Brontë to the Continent and urged her to follow, as she would a year later, gaining the experience required to write The Professor and Villette:
Mary’s letter spoke of some of the pictures & cathedrals she had seen—pictures the most exquisite—& cathedrals the most venerable—I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her letter—such a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work—such a strong wish for wings—wings such as wealth can furnish—such an urgent thirst to see—to know—to learn—something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute—I was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties unexercised—then all collapsed and I despaired.
Characteristically, she follows this outburst with an apology to Ellen:
My dear Nell—I would hardly make that confession to any one but yourself—and to you rather in a letter than ‘viva voce’—these rebellious & absurd emotions were only momentary—I quelled them in five minutes… (7 August 1841)
When Jane Eyre was published, Brontë refused to acknowledge her authorship of the novel to Ellen. Indeed, she required her friend to certify that she was not ‘“publishing”—(humbug!) Whoever has said it—if any one has, which I doubt—is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none’ (3 May 1848). Yet Brontë made a full disclosure of her authorship to Mary and sent Jane Eyre to her in New Zealand, where she had emigrated in pursuit of independence and acceptable employment. In a letter written to Brontë after the publication of Shirley, Mary takes her friend to task for the views of working women expressed in her novel:
I have seen some extracts from Shirley in which you talk of women working. And this first duty, this great necessity you seem to think that some women may indulge in—if they give up marriage & don’t make themselves too disagreeable to the other sex. You are a coward & a traitor.4
Although we can only regret the loss of Brontë’s letters to her bolder and more imaginative correspondents, her letters to Ellen are a woman’s letters written in the context of an enduring and supportive friendship. Moreover, they are written by a particular woman who prized honesty and openness above all else. ‘[R]ather in a letter than “viva voce”.…’ Brontë’s letters, and especially her letters to Ellen, include confidences and confessions that she had no opportunity and less willingness to express in speech. Her talk could be lively, so long as she was at home or among friends, but writing gave her the freedom to be lively while examining herself and her circumstances in a way that conversation could not. Besides, written language was for her, as for Lucy Snowe, always ‘the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve’.5 Like the novels, Brontë’s letters bear ample witness to her claim that she had ‘something of my own to say, and a way of my own to say it in’ (?early September 1848).
What can the letters tell us about the times in which she lived and the novels she wrote? Although they are—like Brontë’s first attempt at a novel—‘deficient in “startling incident” and “thrilling excitement”’ (6 November 1847)—they show us what the life of an ambitious, talented, and conscientious single woman was like in the middle of the nineteenth century. By the time she was twenty-one, this single woman had received (and refused) two proposals of marriage, one from Ellen’s brother Henry, a curate looking for a suitable wife on the rebound, and the other from David Pryce, a lively Irish curate with whom Brontë certainly flirted. She had taken a month-long vacation at the seaside with her best friend, taught in a school, and tried out governessing in two houses. She had written a great deal of fiction and poetry, and sent some of her poems to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, asking his opinion of them and declaring her wish ‘to be forever known’ as a poet.6
It was kind of Southey to reply, though it was unkind of him to exclude her from the company of those who were free to dedicate themselves to art. Brontë responded that she found his advice—‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’—‘kind, and wise’ and promised to ‘suppress’ any wish to see her name in print. ‘I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them’, she tells him (16 March 1837). This acknowledgement of how dull she found ‘the business of a woman’s life’ anticipates Jane Eyre’s famous protest: women ‘feel just as men feel,’ ‘need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do,’ and ‘suffer from too rigid a restraint . . . precisely as men would suffer . . .’.7 Virginia Woolf cited Jane Eyre’s complaint in support of her claim that Brontë’s indignation kept her from expressing a genius even greater than Jane Austen’s.8
Brontë’s reply to Southey expressed chagrin and humility, but she continued to write both poetry and fiction, and it was she who urged her sisters to join her in getting their names into print nine years later when they published a book of their poems at their own expense. All the same, her letters demonstrate how well she understood what Southey meant. They catalogue not only the obstacles to her ambition and her habitual suppression of her restless longing for a larger scope for the life of her mind and imagination but the huge double bind that restrained her and other Victorian women. She longed for a wider experience and wanted to be active and earning money—like her brother Branwell—yet she felt bound to stay at home with her widowed father.
Her obligation to her father did not, fortunately, keep her from continuing her education in Brussels, with a view to preparing herself to open a school with her sisters, but it helped her to refuse a highly paid teaching position in a large school in Manchester when she returned. The daughter’s bind casts a new light on the Victorian widower’s usual effort to marry again. Perhaps if Patrick Brontë had been successful in remarrying, or if the children’s aunt had not died while Emily and Charlotte were at school in Brussels, Charlotte would have sought work away from Haworth. That work would have been teaching. Had she undertaken it, she might not have become a novelist. So long as she was committed to keeping her father’s house and caring for him, only her imagination was free to wander. Jane Eyre’s cosmic vehemence and single-minded dedication to dissecting the heart in its heroine’s heaving breast owe everything to this combination of imaginative freedom and daily constraints.
Brontë shared both the freedom and the constraints with her sisters, and especially with Emily, until their deaths. In the single year between October 1847 and October 1848 Charlotte published Jane Eyre, Emily Wuthering Heights, and Anne both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Branwell’s death at the end of September of that year was followed by Emily’s, and then Anne’s, so that by spring of 1849 Charlotte was the only one left. Brontë’s letters give us our closest view of what life in the Parsonage was like in those exciting and terrible times. One of them was written after her return from Scarborough, where she had gone with Anne in the hope that the sea air would improve Anne’s chances of recovery from consumption. Their time in Scarborough was very short, and Brontë buried her sister there. The letter to Ellen, who had accompanied them, describes her return to Haworth by noting the reaction of Anne’s spaniel Flossy and Emily’s mastiff Keeper. ‘The dogs seemed in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbingers of others—the dumb creatures thought that as I was returned—those who had been so long absent were not far behind’ (23 June 1849).
Brontë’s freedom of movement, at least intermittent movement, increased dramatically after Jane Eyre made her a celebrity. At the age of thirty-one, she found herself with a new set of acquaintances and friends in the great world beyond Haworth. The letters to Ellen are now joined by letters to her publisher, George Smith; to his reader, W. S. Williams; to G. H. Lewes, who had reviewed Jane Eyre; to James Taylor, a member of her publisher’s firm, who also courted her with a view to marriage; and to Elizabeth Gaskell. There were five trips to London, each one more ambitious than the last, all described in letters to both Ellen and her father. Brontë had dinner with Thackeray, who first pleased her by shaking hands and then offended her by boasting at the Garrick Club that he had been dining with ‘Jane Eyre’. There were opportunities, indeed urgings, to meet interesting people, go to the opera at Covent Garden, watch Macready in Macbeth and Rachel (the woman Fanny Kemble called ‘the most incomparable dramatic artist I ever saw’9) in two plays, admire the pictures in the National Gallery and some Turners in a private collection, pay two visits to the Crystal Palace, visit a phrenologist with George Smith, and attend most of Thackeray’s lectures on ‘The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century’.
London social life was a particular challenge for someone who described herself as having ‘an unamiable want of sociability’.10 Perhaps this conclusion—based on her experience as a governess and confirmed by her sojourn in Brussels—came to be adjusted in view of her changed circumstances as a celebrated writer. As Currer Bell, she was treated with respect, politeness, and, especially, attention. As Currer Bell, she felt free for the first time to express herself with the trenchancy previously displayed only within the walls of the Parsonage and in her correspondence.
Brontë reminded G. H. Lewes, who had advised her ‘not to stray far from the ground of experience’, that ‘the real experience of each individual’ was ‘very limited’ (6 November 1847). Novels were dictated by imagination. But the importance of Brontë’s ‘real experience’ at this time in her life goes beyond its being a basis for important scenes in Villette or providing her with a whole new set of historical originals out of whom she could fashion fictional characters. Characters in Jane Eyre have the quality of elemental forces that do Jane good or harm. Characters in Villette are more mixed, and we see them thinking, acting, and talking in a range of different circumstances and relations. Their effect on the novel’s heroine, Lucy Snowe, is also mixed and often at odds with their intentions. The action of Jane Eyre moves from setting to setting—Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, Ferndean—while the action of Villette takes place almost entirely in one setting, yet the later novel is more worldly, its cast of characters more diverse, and its interest in the various forms of bourgeois life and relationship much more wide-ranging.
Brontë’s letters to and about George Smith, the model for Graham Bretton aka Dr John, tell us as much about the differences between lived and imagined life as they do about any similarities. In the life as revealed by the letters, Brontë is a new kind of literary lion, and George Smith is her proud handler, eager to display London to her and her to London. He is also a handsome, younger bachelor, and the prosperous and well-connected head of a firm and a family of women. In the novel, Graham Bretton is the handsome only child of a devoted mother, older than Lucy and dedicated to restoring his family’s fortune through his medical practice. Graham Bretton hardly sees Lucy, but George Smith approved of Brontë, and she warmed to his appreciation. The difference between Smith’s professional interest in Brontë and Dr John’s professional interest in Lucy is as revealing as it is sardonic. Instead of being her publisher’s prize, Lucy is only an excessively sensitive young woman with an interesting kind of nervous disorder, an object of sympathy for Dr John and a scientific curiosity ripe for study. Brontë may or may not have been in love with George Smith, but she certainly minded the difference to their friendship that his marriage inevitably made.
Theatrical performance is important in Jane Eyre, but Villette is the only novel in which Brontë represents a woman who, like herself, earns her living as an artist. In creating Vashti, Brontë provides probably our best example of how the novelist’s imagination transports real experience into a fictional world. She writes about Rachel’s performances briefly in a letter to Ellen and more fully in one to James Taylor:
Rachel’s Acting transfixed me with wonder, enchained me with interest and thrilled me with horror. The tremendous power with which she expresses the very worst passions in their strongest essence forms an exhibition as exciting as the bull-fights of Spain and the gladiatorial combats of old Rome—and (it seemed to me) not one whit more moral than these poisoned stimulants to popular ferocity. (15 November 1851)
In her letter to Sydney Dobell, who had earned her respect by writing an appreciative review of Wuthering Heights, she admits that if she could ‘bear the high mental stimulus so long’, she ‘would go every night for three months to watch and study’ the manifestations of ‘this strange being’.11 In Villette, Vashti’s achievement stands as the highest kind of creative act, an entirely adequate expression of feeling—one that ‘astonished Hope and hushed Desire’, ‘outstripped Impulse and paled Conception’.12
The other signal experience that fed Villette was Brontë’s earlier sojourn in Brussels, where she was both a pupil and a teacher at the Pensionnat Heger, first together with Emily and then on her own. In a letter to Emily, written during her second stay in Brussels when she lacked the relief provided by her sister’s daily companionship and their regular visits with the Taylor sisters, she writes that she ‘get[s] on from day to day in a Robinson-Crusoe-like condition—very lonely’.13 The comparison is apt, and not. Crusoe was famously able to thrive without human companionship, but social isolation always set off nervous alarms in Brontë, producing home-sickness and low spirits.
In a later letter, written again to Emily, not Ellen, Brontë recounts an episode that readers of Villette will easily recognize. During the long summer holiday, confined entirely to her own company, she grew desperate to get out of the Pensionnat and took to tramping about Brussels. ‘I should inevitably fall into the gulf of low spirits if I stayed always by myself here without a human being to speak to,’ she writes. On a ‘whim’, she entered the famous Church of Saint-Michel and Sainte-Gudule and ‘took a fancy to change [herself] into a Catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like’. Once her confession began, she gave up pretending to be a Catholic and presented herself to the priest as a foreigner and a Protestant. When he explained that she was therefore not entitled to the privilege of confession, she characteristically insisted and prevailed. ‘I actually did confess—a real confession.’ The priest urged her to come to his house every morning so that he could convince her of the error of her ways. ‘Of course, however, the adventure stops there, and I hope I shall never see the priest again. I think you had better not tell papa of this. He will not understand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think I am going to turn Catholic’ (2 September 1843).
Brontë’s letter to Emily is full of high spirits despite having low spirits to report. By this time she was suffering the differently painful effects of both Heger’s and his wife’s neglect, for which she blamed only Madame. Certainly she is right that the Reverend Patrick Brontë would not have understood or approved his daughter’s participation in a Romanist ritual. Few young women would have been bold enough to explore the streets of a foreign city on their own in the middle of the nineteenth century. Who but Charlotte Brontë would have dared to turn herself into a Catholic and make her confession to a priest? The ‘freak’, as she calls it in the letter to Emily, grew out of restlessness and loneliness, but it required the same imaginative nerve that still thrills readers of her novels.
Like Lucy in Villette, Brontë withholds the precise content of her confession from her reader. Juliet Barker, Brontë’s most thorough biographer, believes that she confessed her ‘growing obsession’ with Constantin Heger to the priest, an obsession that Barker more harshly calls the ‘guilty secret’ that estranged Madame Heger from her.14 But Brontë would have been unlikely to confess feelings for Heger other than those of a devoted pupil who had grown compulsively reliant on his attention and approval, and there were plenty of other reasons for Madame to be wary of her.
The precise nature of Brontë’s feelings for Heger and the context in which they germinated have been vexed issues for Brontë’s biographers. We can be sure that the kind of attention Heger gave Brontë—and many of his other pupils—was tinged with sexual excitement. The over-heated, erotically charged atmosphere of Villette’s pensionnat, a female space accessible to a single male professor, no doubt owes a lot to Brontë’s own experience. The kind of attention Brontë had from Heger was entirely unfamiliar to her, and she was, to begin with, an unusual pupil—foreign, older, socially awkward, intellectually gifted, and craving confirmation of her own genius. Although Heger showed Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë’s first biographer, at least excerpts from letters Brontë wrote to him after her return to Haworth, the full text of four of them became public only when two of his children presented them to the British Museum in 1913. Three of these letters had been torn up, perhaps by Heger, and then pieced together, perhaps by his wife. In the last letter to him that survives, Brontë analyses her predicament this way:
I will tell you candidly that during this time of waiting I have tried to forget you, for the memory of a person one believes one is never to see again, and whom one nevertheless greatly respects, torments the mind exceedingly and when one has suffered this kind of anxiety for one or two years, one is ready to do anything to regain peace of mind. I have done everything, I have sought occupations, I have absolutely forbidden myself the pleasure of speaking about you—even to Emily, but I have not been able to overcome either my regrets or my impatience—and that is truly humiliating—not to know how to get the mastery over one’s own thoughts, to be the slave of a regret, a memory, the slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant over one’s mind. Why cannot I have for you exactly as much friendship as you have for me—neither more nor less? Then I would be so tranquil, so free—I could keep silence for ten years without effort. (18 November [1845])
This letter is remarkable because Brontë seems entirely unguarded in expressing her desperation and longing. Bound not to write more than twice a year, she suffers in silence, and then suffers more horribly because Heger neglects to write back to her.
Barker compares Charlotte’s feelings about Heger to Branwell’s feelings about Mrs Robinson, the mother of the young man Branwell was tutoring and the reason he was dismissed from his position, but the differences between the brother and sister could not be more marked. While both Charlotte and Branwell suffer banishment from a loved person, Charlotte never imagined, as Branwell surely did in his own case, that Heger’s marriage kept him from responding more fully to her. She certainly never attributed adulterous feelings to him, as Branwell attributed them to Mrs Robinson, probably with good reason. Charlotte’s self-acknowledged humiliation in the face of her own inability to accept the loss of Heger’s attentions is really the opposite of Branwell’s pride in his own attractions and his perpetual pursuit of oblivion as his chances with Mrs Robinson slipped away.
Thackeray’s faux pas at his club—his boast that he had met Jane Eyre—is one that Brontë’s readers continue to make with respect to Villette. The most important evidence in favour of Brontë’s loving Heger and wishing to marry him is Lucy Snowe’s loving Paul Emanuel and wishing to marry him. But Brontë isn’t Lucy Snowe, even if no one but Brontë could have imagined her. The febrile feelings Brontë expresses in her letters to Heger are familiar enough. Some readers will appreciate the honesty and verbal acumen with which she analyses her situation. Unlike Lucy, who writes two letters to Dr John, one dictated by feeling that she discards and the other dictated by reason that she sends, Brontë writes and sends the letter feeling has dictated, all the while knowing that it is likely to be received as the ravings of a lunatic spirit. Other readers will find these letters embarrassing. Feelings that have escaped from our control are embarrassing. But it is impossible to know whether Brontë’s feelings did escape her control. In her biography of Brontë, Lyndall Gordon describes Brontë’s letters to Heger as close to an ‘imaginative act’.15 The differences between these letters and her others support this view of them. They were written in French rather than English, and they were written for the teacher who had improved her command of his language by reading and correcting her French compositions. She would have taken exceptional care in writing them. She would have produced draft versions of them. She was not after all the heroine of one of her own novels but a talented writer in training for the important work to come.
Brontë’s letters are full of character sketches as discerning as those in her novels. Her stringent self-portraits include the one she backhandedly provides when she describes the woman Henry Nussey ought to marry in her letter to him declining his proposal of marriage. Brontë would tell Ellen, in confirming that Henry had proposed and that she had refused him, that she ‘had not, and never could have that intense attachment’ to him that would justify their marrying, ‘and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband . . .’ (12 March 1839). Her marriage to Nicholls proved her prediction interestingly wrong. ‘If I ever marry,’ she ought to have predicted, ‘it must be in that light of adoration that my Husband will regard me.’ But she told Henry something different and more comforting. She wrote that she was convinced that hers was ‘not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you’.
It has always been my habit to study the characters of those amongst whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original—her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her ‘personal attractions’ sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride. As for me you do not know me, I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose—16
Brontë’s portrait of the woman who would suit Henry as a wife—the woman she is not—points to her insecurity about her own personal attractions and her concern about her tendency to collapse into depression. But it also provides a view of what Brontë claimed for herself—a character ‘too marked, ardent and original’ for many people. Over and over again, her letters proclaim the value such a character had for the friends and readers who had the good fortune to know her and the taste and feeling to appreciate her.