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.” It was Shirley, set in the West Riding of Yorkshire, albeit during the Napoleonic Wars, with its local characters that would help betray its author: a few months later the London Morning Post reported that “the only daughter of the Rev. P Brontë, incumbent of Haworth, is the authoress of Jane Eyre and Shirley, two of the most popular novels of the day.” In August of 1850, the Kay-Shuttleworths of Gawthorpe Hall arranged a meeting between Elizabeth and Charlotte at their home in Windermere. Gaskell reports meeting the younger woman to a friend, noting “soft brown hair not so dark as mine,” the eyes “very good and expressive looking straight & open at you,” all of these features together “plain,” the sweet voice and hesitant speech, words “admirable and just befitting the occasion.” She writes too that “Such a life as Miss B’s I never heard of before.”

Six years later, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Elizabeth Gaskell, was published by Smith, Elder & Co. As scandalous as it was popular, it had to be redacted and reissued, but its third edition has been in print continuously since then. Graham Watson, a specialist in both Gaskell and Brontë, has now published The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life with Pegasus Books. The book’s British subtitle, “Her Last Years and the Scandal that Made Her,” is rather more accurate, as Watson begins with the publication of Shirley, and continues on to Brontë’s worldly afterlife as nurtured by Gaskell’s biography. This is an excellent, carefully detailed account of literary ambition and friendship, of slightly discomforting truths about Victorian publishing, and finally of the mythmaking, as Watson considers it, that has given us our Charlotte Brontë. He finds that Gaskell was more diligent than has been thought in her research for the Life, and that her official recantation of certain offensive portions was insincere, made really to protect herself and others from legal consequences. The discovery of her dishonesty between the editions would affirm her honesty while first writing. Meanwhile, in reading Watson’s accounts of Brontë’s dinner table disclosures, her dealings with publishers, and her treatment of Harriet Martineau, we can take a less tragic view of the woman and find her rather impressive in her capacity as an artist of great skill and determination.

Victorian writers were often hidden: Thackery used many pseudonyms, and until the Life, Gaskell had only published anonymously. As Brontë explains in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, the sisters chose the ambiguous names Currer, Ellis, and Acton because they wanted to avoid feminine names without misleading or lying with masculine ones. They noticed that when reviewing women’s work, critics would either “use for their chastisement the weapon of personality” or “for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.” One of Brontë’s many difficulties was in trusting and accepting criticism of her work. Losing her anonymity allowed her to meet Gaskell, Thackery, Matthew Arnold, and some of her many admirers during her visits to London, but the game of identification between author and character was to continue. Gaskell’s Life seems to find the beginnings of Jane Eyre in a story Brontë would have heard at boarding school, one which did not involve any of her familiars. But Villette was an awkward publication, not only for its depiction of the pensionnat in Brussels whose real-life model became known, but also, as Watson shows, because the heroine Lucy Snowe’s unrequited love of John Bretton was “a confession made from behind a mask” of the secret love that Brontë held for her publisher George Smith. He was, of course, one of the first people to read it. Brontë’s notoriety was vexing and embarrassing to her, but she did not simply shrink from attention. While Gaskell’s daughter remembers her literally hiding behind a curtain to avoid meeting a new guest, Watson notes that she was able to confide something of the personal, such as her passions at the pensionnat, to people she had just met. There were “anecdotes she coined for strangers and confidantes alike that could not fail to win their hearts,” and these, as Watson believes Brontë knew, were to contribute to her tragic legacy. 

One is pleased and a little relieved to read a literary biography with a sensibility that enlivens and remembers why its subject is worthy of discussion. Watson has to reckon with the standard achieved by Gaskell in the Life, which begins with a remarkably immersive narrated journey from the train station at Keighley, up to Haworth, and into the church where many of the Brontës are buried. His New Life has some heavy weather, which gives the Brontëan landscape its majesty. After Gaskell’s visit to the parsonage where she hoped to collect some materials, she is delayed on her way back to Manchester: “The pressure of the sultry evening brought a darkness troubled by rolling peals of thunder. Torrential rain flooded the reservoir high up on the moors, bursting the banks of the stream that ran through Thornton, the place of Charlotte’s birth, sweeping away everything in its path.” And Watson also permits himself here and there the droll humor of the Scotsman. This consists first in understatement. Brontë’s father, Patrick the vicar, and her widow, his curate Arthur Bell Nicholls, hoped to be hymned and praised along with her in Gaskell’s Life: “All that stood in their way were the contents of Charlotte’s letters and everything she had told her about both men.” And second, in the careful timing of bathos. Charlotte’s friend from boarding school, Ellen Nussey, whose letters are used all over the Life to provide the account of Charlotte’s emotional travails, learned of a £100 goodwill payment to Arthur. “Ellen—an unmarried, unemployed woman living on savings and dividends from private annuities—wondered if her own contribution merited some compensation too. She received it eventually: a free copy of the book.”

Charlotte’s death in 1855 was the completion of a tragedy. All six Brontë siblings had now died and left no children. The cause may have been hyperemesis gravidarum, but it was thought at the time to have been tuberculosis, as it was for Emily and Anne, and long before, Elizabeth. There were rumors of neglect, and though Gaskell’s Life would record that every effort was made to save her life, it also showed Patrick Brontë sending his daughters to the Cowan Bridge school with its terrible conditions, and when they were home, feeding them only potatoes. The tragic story was a literary opportunity for anyone connected with Brontë. Harriet Martineau, whom Brontë had cut off, sent an article titled “Currer Bell is dead!” to the Daily News without giving the family her sympathies, Matthew Arnold pitched an elegy to Fraser’s Magazine, and Elizabeth, moving more cautiously, sent letters to a possible source and published a piece anonymously in Sharpe’s London Magazine to test the level of public interest. Later, James Kay-Shuttleworth hoped to edit Brontë posthumously as a substitute for his own writing career. This is all a little dispiriting to read, but if it can be accepted that human affections have a possessive edge which can be turned nearly to exploitation, then the efforts of Elizabeth, Ellen Nussey, and perhaps even Harriet Martineau can be understood with more sympathy.

There was an odd, ironic sequence leading to Gaskell’s writing the Life, in which Ellen read the anonymous article which contained uncomfortable disclosures about Patrick, wrote to Arthur in outrage, and then suggested that Charlotte’s writer friend Gaskell ought to write a riposte, prompting Patrick to make the request of Gaskell of a “long or short account of her life and works.” Much of the truth about Charlotte Brontë’s life was thus made public, and though parts concerning Cowan Bridge, an affair involving Charlotte’s brother Branwell, and Patrick Brontë’s eccentric parenting were to be changed for the third edition, Watson’s research has now vindicated the first. His book provides the chilly realities of writing and editing as professions so that those who were so inclined can no longer think of Brontë’s story as the simple triumph of her art against her circumstances. But the principle one has discerned in reading Brontë, carried by its relentless seriousness and intensity of expression, remains. George Smith (who the whole time was hoping to publish Thackeray), recalls the two novelists in conversation on their craft: “He would talk in a bantering and burlesque way, as though he was ashamed of it. But this was only by way of defence against Charlotte Brontë’s earnest and heroic views of the ‘sacredness’ and ‘dignity’ of literature.”

Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in Cleveland Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Oxonian Review. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.