In his introduction to Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Emma’, her never-to-be-completed last work, W. M. Thackeray wrote, ‘Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honour, so to speak, of the woman?’ Recalling his first meeting with the tiny little authoress, he remembered her ‘impetuous honesty’. Many of these qualities are evident too in her letters. And there are others: her passionate truth may be leavened by an unexpected sense of humour or a lively self-mockery, her critiques of the books she read may be wittily acerbic, and her accounts of some of the key episodes in her life, such as her first meeting with her publishers, or Arthur Nicholls’s proposal of marriage, are brilliantly dramatic.
At their best Charlotte’s letters have the immediacy of good conversation—a quality she relished in those she received. Your letter ‘is just written as I wish you to write to me—not a detail too much … I imagine your face—voice—presence very plainly when I read your letters’, she wrote to Ellen Nussey on 19 January 1847 after sixteen years of close friendship. Most of Charlotte’s surviving letters were written to Ellen, whom she had first met at Margaret Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Mirfield, in 1831. Charlotte realized Ellen’s limitations, but enjoyed her company: ‘Just now I am enjoying the treat of my friend Ellen’s society,’ Charlotte wrote to her publisher’s reader, W. S. Williams, on 3 January 1850, ‘and she makes me indolent and negligent … no new friend, however lofty or profound in intellect … could be to me what Ellen is, yet she is no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl. She is without romance—if she attempts to read poetry—or poetic prose aloud—I am irritated and deprive her of the book … but she is good—she is true—she is faithful and I love her.’ The two friends continued to write freely to each other for the rest of Charlotte’s life, save for one serious estrangement from July 1853 until February 1854. This was caused by Ellen’s jealousy of the curate Arthur Nicholls, who had usurped her privileged first place in Charlotte’s affection. The rift was healed through the mediation of Margaret Wooler, Ellen was the bridesmaid at Charlotte’s marriage to Arthur Nicholls on 29 June 1854, and their correspondence continued until early March 1855. After that date Charlotte, already mortally ill, had to ask Nicholls to write on her behalf.
Though we learn comparatively little of Charlotte’s intellectual life from her letters to Ellen, they provide much insight into other facets of her personality and experience. In many intimate, spontaneous letters, she shares with Ellen the intense moods of adolescence: at one extreme her despair over her own spiritual crises, at the other her amusement, impatience, or excitement, often expressed with a racy disregard for ladylike reserve, or her fierce indignation at unworthy or immoral behaviour. We hear of the joyous companionship of the sisters at Haworth parsonage before they separated to suffer the torments of governess-life, and before the agonizing years when first Branwell Brontë, then Emily, then Anne fell ill and died. Ellen is told about the short-lived exhilaration of Charlotte’s early months in the Brussels pensionnat, and the later ‘dreary weight’ of depressing solitude and of distrust of Mme Heger. Understandably the strength of Charlotte’s attraction to M. Heger remains concealed; but she gives remarkably candid accounts of her reactions to some of the men who found her attractive or proposed to her: the earnest Revd Henry Nussey in March 1839, the lively Revd David Pryce in August the same year; and later, in 1851, James Taylor, who seems to have drawn back from an outright proposal. From Charlotte’s letters to Ellen we learn much about contemporary provincial life: about the difficulties of travel, the novelty of the railways, the friendly exchanges of long visits, the financial crises in households of women; the custom of ‘bride-visits’, the Whitsuntide celebrations and processions of parishioners, the lectures at mechanics’ institutes. Inevitably, we hear too of the frightening prevalence of TB, the ravages of cholera, and the ineffectiveness of contemporary medicines for such diseases.
The letters Charlotte wrote to her father show her constant concern for his welfare, her understanding of his interests, and her awareness of his pride in her achievements. Writing from London in June 1850, she describes with wonderful vividness the animals and birds she has seen and heard in the Zoological Gardens, and some of the pictures in the London exhibitions, such as John Martin’s ‘The Last Man’ ‘shewing the red sun, fading out of the sky and all the foreground made up of bones and skulls’. In other letters she tells him of her meetings with famous writers, such as Thackeray and Mrs Gaskell, and of seeing ‘great lords and ladies’. In June 1851 she evokes for him the strange grandeur of the Crystal Palace, where the ‘living tide of people rolls on quietly—with a deep hum like the sea heard from a distance’.
Charlotte’s letters to her sister Emily show the close bond of affection between them. From her ‘house of bondage’ as a governess in the service of the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe, she writes in a brief note: ‘Mine bonnie love, I was as glad of your letter as tongue can express,’ and in a letter included here, she voices her furious resentment at the injustice of her situation, where complaints about those ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’, her pupils, bring only black looks from their mother. Like Emily, when she is away from Haworth, she longs for liberty and home. To Emily also she writes from Mme Heger’s school in Brussels, in one letter frankly describing the teachers who ‘hate each other like two cats’ and in a second, written after her nightmarish experience of silence and solitude during the long vacation, Charlotte describes her ‘real confession’ in the church of Sainte-Gudule, as well as her determination not to return to the priest who would try to convince her ‘of the error and enormity of being a Protestant’. A confidential letter written on i May 1843 from Brussels to her brother Branwell condemns ‘the phlegmatic, false inhabitants’ of the school—with the ‘sole veritable exception’ of the ‘black Swan Mr Heger’. Branwell had been Charlotte’s close collaborator in the endless web of their Angrian saga: their joint creation of fantastically glamorous Byronic heroes, heroines, and villains, embroiled in love and war. She did not know that her brother, now a tutor in the Robinson family at Thorp Green in Yorkshire, was entangling himself, allegedly, in an affair with his employer’s wife, which would lead to his disgrace and dismissal.
Yet Charlotte herself had become infatuated with her teacher, M. Constantin Heger, who was happily married to the efficient directress of the Brussels pensionnat, Mme Claire Zoë Heger. Only four of the many letters she wrote to him after her return to England survive. Written in French, the language they had used in his lessons and conversations, they reveal her longing for his assurance of continuing friendship for her. Her last surviving letter to him, written on 18 November 1845, is one of scarcely controlled emotion: when, day after day, the long-awaited letter from her master fails to come, she is in a fever: je perds l’appétit et le sommeil—je dépéris’.
Certainly Madame Heger read these too-revealing letters, which were not known in their entirety to the general public until 1913. Mrs Gaskell had incorporated carefully chosen excerpts from them in her life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, including nothing that would sully her pure image. But on 6 June 1913 the Heger family offered the letters to the British Museum, not to arouse but to quash speculation about the relationship; and the family gave permission for the letters to be published in full in The Times for 29 July 1913, with translations and an explanation by the art critic Marion H. Spielmann, who believed that English people would understand that they simply expressed Charlotte’s honest admiration and gratitude.
It is fair to assume that none of Charlotte’s own family read the letters to Heger during her lifetime, though her father and A. B. Nicholls were to read Mrs Gaskell’s excerpts from them in the Life. But they could read Villette before her death and The Professor after it; and one wonders what they made of the master-pupil relationship in those novels—one ending in brief bliss destroyed by the dividing sea, and the other in the wish-fulfilment of perfect marriage.
Charlotte had completed her fair copy of The Professor (originally entitled ‘The Master’) by 27 July 1846, having incorporated in the early chapters material deriving from her juvenile tales. She and Branwell had both exploited the dramatic potential of a complex relationship between two brothers, one violent, materialistic, and cynical, the other cloaking his determination to resist tyranny beneath a cool, taciturn exterior until he breaks out of his servitude and makes his own way in the world. Such breaking out reflected Charlotte’s own longing to fulfil herself as a writer. In 1836 she had written to the poet Robert Southey, enclosing some of her poems and acknowledging her bold ambition to be ‘for ever known’ as a poetess. Warned by him to put her ‘proper duties’ as a woman first, and to write ‘poetry for its own sake… not with a view to celebrity’, Charlotte was sincerely grateful for his ‘kind & wise advice’ and his opinion that her poems were not without merit. In fact few of her poems exceed this modest standard; no one remembers her primarily for her verse. But when Hartley Coleridge, the son of S. T. Coleridge, disparaged the prose tale she sent him in 1840, she was evidently piqued by his discouraging response. No doubt the story she sent him was immature; but despite her acknowledgement that she was obliged for his ‘kind and candid letter’, her reply, both in its draft form and in her fair copy of 10 December 1840, is couched in a sardonic, flamboyant, hardly respectful style. She mocks the absurdity, real or pretended, of the ‘great’ novelists, as well as her own literary ambitions. Fortunately for posterity, she and her sisters possessed a creative genius which could not be permanently suppressed or discouraged.
Nevertheless the sisters had to pay for the printing, publication, and advertising of their first book, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, in 1846. Some of Charlotte’s letters to the publishers, Aylott & Jones, are included in this selection. Writing as ‘C. Brontë’ on behalf of ‘three persons—relatives’ whose ‘separate pieces are distinguished by their respective signatures’, Charlotte fulfilled the ‘Bells’’ ambition of ‘appearing before the public’. The series of letters to Aylott & Jones began on 28 January 1846; and the little volume stole into life on or soon after 22 May that year. Now one of the most sought-after of collectors’ volumes, the book achieved a sale of only two copies, though discerning reviews appeared in The Critic and The Athenaeum on 4 July and in The Dublin University Magazine for October 1846; and the authors’ autographs were requested by one satisfied purchaser, the songwriter Frederick Enoch.
On 6 April 1846, about six weeks before the poems appeared, Charlotte had written to Aylott & Jones to ask whether they would also publish ‘a work of fiction—consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales’. The Bells did not intend ‘to publish these tales on their own account’, Charlotte declared. They could hardly have afforded to do so. The three tales were Charlotte’s The Professor, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Charlotte’s later statement in her ‘Biographical Notice’ of her sisters was misleading: they did not set to work on the stories when the Poems failed to sell as they had hoped; it is likely that all three novels had been at least begun before April 1846. Though Aylott & Jones refused to publish the novels, they advised the ‘Bells’ to try other publishers. None of these agreed to publish The Professor, but in 1847 Thomas Cautley Newby accepted, and published, after months of delay, the other two novels. In the event, Jane Eyre, which Charlotte began to write in August 1846 and completed in August 1847, was the first to be published, on 19 October 1847. On 15 July that year Charlotte had sent The Professor to ‘one publishing house more’, the firm of Smith, Elder & Co. Instead of ‘two hard hopeless lines’ of refusal, Charlotte received a courteous letter discussing its merits and demerits, and adding that ‘a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention’ Jane Eyre was dispatched from Keighley station on 24 August. The young publisher George Smith recalled that his reader, William Smith Williams, recommended the novel to him, and that he was unable to put it down. He finished reading the MS before he went to bed that night.
Most of Charlotte’s early letters to Smith, Elder & Co. are short, businesslike, and formal; but on 4 October 1847 she wrote directly to William Smith Williams, thanking him for his kind counsel and encouragement, and modestly warning him against ‘forming too favourable an idea’ of her powers. He was to become one of her most valued correspondents, especially after she and her sister Anne met him personally in London in July 1848, a ‘pale, mild, stooping man’, quiet and sincere in his attentions to the two shy country visitors. He proved to be knowledgeable and discriminating about art as well as literature, and he helped to choose the books that the firm sent as loans or gifts to Charlotte and her family. She responded with gratitude, and with careful critiques of the books for which he sought her opinion, and much appreciation of the loan of twenty engravings from paintings in Robert Vernon’s great collection. He in turn valued her advice on the possible careers for some of his eight children, especially for his daughters Ellen and Louisa, who were to become governesses. He responded with delicate and sympathetic understanding to her anxieties about her sisters’ and brother’s illnesses, and to her intense grief after their deaths.
The publication of Shirley on 26 October 1849 was followed by a long delay in completing her next novel, Villette, and her friendly correspondence with Williams seems to have dwindled. Perhaps he was discouraged by Charlotte’s rather dismissive attitude to some of the books he sent her at this period. In 1852 only four letters to him survive before her curt note of 26 October that year. It begins, ‘In sending a return box of books to Cornhill—I take the opportunity of enclosing 2 Vols of MS [of Villette]’ There are no thanks for the books, and the last sentence is distantly cool. Happily, there is a partial revival of the old friendly relationship in a letter of 6 November, thanking Williams for his ‘kind letter with its candid and able commentary on “Villette”’, and in the first half of 1853 the courteous and sympathetic friendliness is restored. Her last surviving letter to Williams was written on 6 December 1853, when she had heard that the head of the firm, George Smith, was engaged to be married. Charlotte’s brief, desolate note to Williams ends: ‘Do not trouble yourself to select or send any more books. These courtesies must cease some day—and I would rather give them up than wear them out. Believe me yours sincerely C. Bronte.’
Charlotte first met George Smith in July 1848 when she and Anne had travelled overnight to London to prove the separate identity of the brothers Bell; for T. C. Newby had told an American publisher that he and not Smith, Elder would be publishing ‘Currer Bell’s’ next novel. Newby had assured George Smith that ‘to the best of his belief all three Bells were one writer. Charlotte and Anne convinced the astonished George Smith that Newby had lied. Smith’s natural reaction was the wish to make a show of his best-selling author. Charlotte’s resistance to this, and her excitement and exhaustion, gave her ‘a thundering head-ache & harassing sickness’. Thus she did not at first like her young and handsome publisher. A better understanding and warm friendship developed after she had stayed with Smith, his mother, and his sisters in December 1849. There were to be other friendly visits, companionable outings in London, and an exhilarating stay in Edinburgh. From mid-1850 Smith became Charlotte’s principal London correspondent. The brief business letters she had previously written to him gave place to their friendly correspondence of late 1850, followed by twenty-four long, candid, often affectionately teasing or cheerfully satirical letters in 1851. There were fewer letters in 1852, though the friendship continued; and then a marked falling off in their correspondence from the spring of 1853, caused in part by the long strain of overwork on Smith’s part as the firm expanded its banking and export business. Charlotte could not know that Smith was also more happily preoccupied with the beautiful Elizabeth Blakeway, whom he first met in April 1853. On 10 December 1853 Charlotte wrote a curt, contorted letter of congratulation to him on his engagement to Elizabeth. She wrote more warmly to him on 25 April 1854, when she had received his congratulations on her engagement to Arthur Nicholls.
Smith, Elder’s managing clerk James Taylor also became one of Charlotte’s correspondents. In February 1849 he had sent a candid critique of the first volume of Shirley. He helped to choose books sent to her by the firm, began to lend her copies of the critical journal, The Athenaeum, and on 8 September 1849 collected the manuscript of Shirley from Haworth. In December 1849, observing that he controlled the firm’s clerks with his ‘iron will’, she suspected him of being ‘rigid, despotic and self-willed’. However, in September 1850 he regained her good opinion by sending her a copy of the Palladium article in which Sydney Dobell had discerned the ‘stamp of genius’ in Wuthering Heights. On his farewell visit to Haworth before he left to establish a branch of the Smith, Elder firm in India, he seemed on the point of proposing marriage, but departed with no definite avowal. Two letters from India were followed by total silence on his part; and despite her recoil from his physical presence during the visit, she suffered the pain of ‘absolute uncertainty’ about his intentions. In July 1852 she wrote miserably to Ellen that ‘All is silent as the grave.’ Twelve or possibly thirteen letters to him from Charlotte survive. Careful rather than cordial, they offer opinions on the books he sent her, and on such subjects as Harriet Martineau’s ‘atheism’, which they both deplored. Her last letter to him, dated 15 November 1851, eloquently conveys her horrified, fascinated reaction to the French actress Rachel’s performance, ‘wilder and worse’ than human nature, showing ‘the feelings and fury of a fiend’.
Charlotte’s letters to fellow-authors are of particular interest, for they often reveal either directly or by implication her own literary creed. George Henry Lewes’s criticism of the melodramatic elements in Jane Eyre and his praise of Jane Austen provoked her to a spirited declaration that Austen might be ‘sensible, real (more real than true)’, but without the divine gift of poetry she could not be great. Yet Charlotte recognized Austen’s exquisite adaptation of ‘means to her end’, and distinguished it from the ‘windy wordiness’ to be found in the work of Eliza Lynn or Bulwer Lytton—or indeed in Lewes’s own flamboyant novel, Rose, Blanche, and Violet, and his pretentious play, The Noble Heart.
Though we have only one manuscript letter from Charlotte to Harriet Martineau, there are copies of several others, and numerous letters to other correspondents about Martineau. Together they depict a relationship which began with mutual appreciation and respect, warmed into positive liking when Charlotte stayed with the older writer for a week in December 1850, then declined with Martineau’s public admission of what seemed an atheistic philosophy. The friendship came to an abrupt end on Charlotte’s part when Martineau alleged in a private letter and in a Daily News review of Villette, that all the female characters were full of ‘one thought—love. … It is not thus in real life.’ Charlotte never forgave her.
Regrettably, Charlotte’s letters to Thackeray have not come to light. We may guess that they mingled praise for the writer she had called the ‘first social regenerator of the day’ with some sharp questioning of his opinions on such writers as Fielding, whom she considered immoral. In writing about Thackeray to George Smith, she emphatically deplored his literary sins, his procrastination, and his unfair presentation of women. Thackeray admitted that he deserved some of her criticism: ‘I don’t care a straw for a “triumph”. Pooh!—nor for my art enough,’ he wrote to Mary Holmes on 25 February 1852.
Charlotte’s correspondence with Elizabeth Gaskell reveals much about the personality of both writers. Some forty letters survive, the first written on 17 November 1849, before they had met each other, and the last on 30 September 1854, when the newly married Charlotte warmly invited Mrs Gaskell to visit Haworth again, and to meet her husband. There had been an immediate rapport between the two authors when they met as guests of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth at Briery Close, near Lake Windermere in the Lake District in August 1850. Gaskell, socially accomplished and at ease, well-read, and the author of Mary Barton, was sensitive and sympathetic to the normally shy Charlotte, and to her tragic family circumstances. Charlotte appreciated Mrs Gaskell’s talent, shared her love for Wordsworth’s poetry, and praised her ‘cheerful, pleasing and cordial manners and … kind and good heart’. Their mutual liking was strengthened by Charlotte’s three visits to the Gaskells’ home in Manchester. Her letters reveal their general ‘concord of opinion’ on contemporary events and concerns. Above all, they give a unique insight into Charlotte’s relationship with her future biographer. Acutely distressed by Charlotte’s death, Mrs Gaskell wrote to the Haworth stationer, John Greenwood, on 12 April 1855, ‘Strangers might know her by her great fame, but we loved her dearly for her goodness, truth, and kindness … I loved her dearly, more than I think she knew.’
Letters to others who had known and loved Charlotte for many years have been included. Margaret Wooler, her teacher at Roe Head school, had become a friend in whom she could confide. When Charlotte was feeling the weight of solitude, she wondered at Miss Wooler’s endurance of a similar fate ‘with a serene spirit and an unsoured disposition’, and was grateful for her kind wish for a reconciliation with Ellen Nussey. The reconciliation achieved, it was to Ellen Nussey and two other trusted friends that Charlotte’s last letters were written: Ellen’s friend Amelia Ringrose Taylor, and Laetitia Wheelwright, whom Charlotte had first met in Brussels. The letters are infinitely touching in their affectionate concern for others even while she herself was suffering ‘sickness with scarce a reprieve’, and in her praise of her husband’s kind companionship and tenderest nursing.