Succès de Scandale

When in November of 1849 Charlotte Brontë sent the gift of her second novel to the writer Harriet Martineau, she enclosed a note, writing that “Currer Bell offers a copy of Shirley to Miss Martineau’s acceptance, in acknowledgement of the pleasure and profit she”—then stopped, drawing a line through “she” and replacing it with “he” before continuing. Martineau, like her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, already doubted that Currer Bell was a man, claiming that passages in Jane Eyre about sewing could only have been written by a woman, “or an upholsterer.” Gaskell had heard of a call for medical consultation made a year earlier on behalf of a Miss Brontë by the editor William Smith Williams of Smith, Elder & Co., who told the homeopath that the sister of one of his authors had suddenly taken ill. This was Emily Brontë, about to die of tuberculosis little over a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, by “Ellis Bell.”