Brontës (124 page)

No doubt among those families of daughters sitting waiting to be married Charlotte had in mind the Nusseys: Ann, who at the grand age of fifty-three
had at last secured a husband and was now fluttering about making preparations for her wedding as if she were a schoolgirl bride; Mercy, forty-one years old and so jealous of her elder sister's good fortune that she threatened the happiness of the whole household; Ellen herself, already thirty-two, for so long the subject of Charlotte's teasing about her suitors and earnest advice on the sort of man she should marry and now, like Charlotte, as they both admitted, facing a future as an old maid.
⁷

What that future was likely to be Charlotte painted with grim realism in her portraits of the despised and misunderstood ‘old maids', Miss Mann and Miss Ainley, in
Shirley
. Miss Mann, who had ‘passed alone through protracted scenes of suffering, exercised rigid self-denial, made large sacrifices of time, money, health for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude', had become a censorious, morose and deeply lonely woman. Miss Ainley, who would watch by any sickbed, feared no disease, would nurse the poorest whom no one else would nurse and was serene, humble, kind, and equable throughout, was yet despised for being repellently ugly and barely thanked for her services, which had come to be expected. It was hardly right that the world should demand only one thing of unmarried women: a life of self-sacrifice, requited only by a distant praise for their devotion and virtue. ‘Is this enough? Is it to live?' Charlotte made Caroline Helstone cry as she faced the prospect of spinsterhood:

Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. Undue humility makes tyranny; weak concession creates selfishness … Each human being has his share of rights. I suspect it would conduce to the happiness and welfare of all, if each knew his allotment, and held to it as tenaciously as the martyr to his creed.
⁸

Charlotte always claimed that she could not write books on matters of public interest nor for a moral or philanthropic purpose. Though she was to prove this emphatically by what she omitted from
Shirley
on the question of the rights and sufferings of mill workers, the whole story was an exploration of the ‘Woman Question' which so exercised educated minds at this time. Again, however, despite her fiercely argued case for women to have an independent and valued existence outside marriage, Charlotte lacked the courage of her convictions and, much to Mary Taylor's disgust,
ended her book in the conventional manner by providing both her heroines with a husband.
⁹

Charlotte worked long and hard at her book throughout the summer after Anne's death. Inevitably it was a struggle, not least because her unhappiness manifested itself as usual in ill health. Not surprisingly, after three sudden deaths in the family, she could not help seeing in every cough or cold the first sign of something worse. She had returned from ‘that dismal Easton' with the seeds of a cold that she could not throw off and when she developed a sore throat, cough and pain between her shoulders, she was extremely alarmed. ‘Say nothing about it –', she ordered Ellen, ‘for I confess I am too much disposed to be nervous.' A month later she was still complaining of cold, but a recurrence of her father's bronchitis threw her into near panic: ‘I feel too keenly that he is the last, the only near and dear relation I have in the world.'
¹⁰

Floundering in the depths of hypochondria, which was not helped by an outbreak of English cholera in Haworth, Charlotte commissioned Ellen to buy her a fur boa and cuffs (in July!) and a shower-bath.
¹¹
The emotional milestone of the first anniversary of Branwell's death found her in despair. Both the servants were ill in bed, Martha in a critical condition with an internal inflammation and Tabby, whose lame leg had broken out in ulcers, having had a bad fall from her kitchen chair. Depressed with headache and sickness herself, Charlotte ‘fairly broke down for ten minutes – sat & cried like a fool'. The crisis passed, however. Martha recovered, her mother and sister came to assist in the house and, a few days later, a ‘huge Monster-package' arrived from Leeds containing the shower-bath which Ellen had at last managed to find.
¹²

Throughout these traumas, Charlotte's writing provided her with a lifeline to sanity. By the end of August, the fair copy of the manuscript was complete and ready to go to the publishers. Charlotte found herself unable to decide whether it was better or worse than
Jane Eyre
, but, as she owned to Williams, ‘Whatever now becomes of the work – the occupation of writing it has been a boon to me – it took me out of dark and desolate reality to an unreal but happier region.' After toying with ‘Hollows Mill' and ‘Fieldhead' as the title, she finally settled on
Shirley
, ‘without any explanation or addition – the simpler and briefer, the better'.
¹³

Though she was anxious to send the manuscript off to Cornhill as soon as possible, James Taylor, her newest correspondent at the firm, had offered to call and collect it in person on his return from a holiday in Scotland.
Charlotte was somewhat alarmed at this proposal, particularly as she could not remember meeting Taylor at Cornhill and perhaps suspected his motives in wishing to beard ‘Currer Bell' in his den. The idea that she might be a peep-show for the curious appalled her, but it was difficult to turn down the offer. Instead, while appearing to welcome the prospect of his visit, she tried to put Taylor off with a long recital of the difficulties of actually getting to ‘a strange uncivilized little place' such as Haworth – ‘he must remember that at a station called Shipley the carriages are changed – otherwise they will take him on to Skipton or Colne, or I know not where'. For good measure, she warned him that he could only call for the day because she could not entertain him for longer: ignoring the fact that Arthur Bell Nicholls would gladly have made himself available, she told Taylor she had neither father nor brother to walk the moors with him or show him the neighbourhood. And, like many a child before and since, she blamed her elderly parent for her lack of hospitality. It was irksome to him to give much of his time to a stranger, she claimed, blaming ‘the peculiar retirement of papa's habits'; ‘without being in the least misanthropical or sour-natured – papa habitually prefers solitude to society, and Custom is a tyrant whose fetters it would now be impossible for him to break'.
¹⁴
It was no wonder that Patrick gained a reputation at Cornhill for being a fierce, solitary eccentric when his own daughter described him thus.

When James Taylor did eventually call, on 8 September, the visit did not go well. Charlotte took an immediate personal dislike to him. ‘He is not ugly – but very peculiar', Charlotte later told Ellen privately, ‘the lines in his face shew an inflexibility and – I must add – a hardness of character which do not attract.' When he looked at her ‘in his keen way', she actually recoiled before him and, even though he was clearly both excited and nervous at meeting ‘Currer Bell' for the first time, his stern, abrupt manner only added to her repugnance. Patrick, too, did not get on well with his guest, who seems to have been unaware of the impression he had made on the Brontës. Certainly he reported favourably back to Cornhill, compelling Charlotte to reciprocate with more politeness than truth that the pleasure had been mutual and that she and her father had enjoyed the hour or two of conversation with him exceedingly.
¹⁵
When Taylor wrote to her a few days after his visit, Charlotte did not reply for a week, excusing herself on the grounds that she had had a clergyman staying, though she had found time in the interval for at least five letters to Williams.
¹⁶

It was an immense relief to Charlotte to get the manuscript of
Shirley
off
her hands at last, particularly when Williams wrote back expressing a favourable opinion. ‘Your letter gave me great pleasure', she declared.

An author who has shewn his book to none, held no consultation about plan, subject, characters or incidents, asked and had no opinon from one living being, but fabricated it darkly in the silent workshop of his own brain – such an author awaits with a singular feeling the report of the first impression produced by his creation in a quarter where he places confidence
¹⁷

The unspoken thought was implicit in every line – this was not how Charlotte had been accustomed to write.

Despite her apparent deference to the gentlemen of Smith, Elder & Co., Charlotte was quite capable of standing her own ground and defying them. She had already refused to replace the first chapter. Now, when Williams added his weight to James Taylor's criticisms of the episode of Shirley's nervousness after she had been bitten by a supposedly mad dog, Charlotte admitted the justice of their remarks: ‘the thing is badly managed – and I bend my head and expect in resignation what,
here
, I know I deserve – the lash of criticism', but added, ‘I
cannot
alter now. It sounds absurd but so it is.' ‘I can work indefatigably at the correction of a work before it leaves my hands,' she told Williams, ‘but when once I have looked on it as completed and submitted to the inspection of others – it becomes next to impossible to alter or amend.'
¹⁸
The only major concession she made was to substitute a translation for the French
devoir
she had written as a specimen of Shirley's work for Louis Moore. Since this alteration had not been specifically requested, though Williams had observed that the French in
Shirley
might be cavilled at, Charlotte seems to have decided on it unilaterally fearing it might be thought pretentious.
¹⁹

On only one point did Charlotte and Cornhill lock horns, and that was over the preface Charlotte had written for the work. It was an answer to the unsigned notice of
Jane Eyre
by Elizabeth Rigby in the
Quarterly Review
of December 1848. When it appeared, Charlotte was still numb from the shock and grief of Emily's sudden death: ‘the lash of the Quarterly, however severely applied, cannot sting', she had then written.
²⁰
Over the succeeding months, however, Charlotte had brooded on the review and eventually decided to answer her critic, just as Anne had answered hers in her preface to the third edition of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
. Anne's preface had been a dignified and reasonable, though passionately argued,
defence of the realism of her scenes of debauchery and attack on the critics' assumption that her sex made a difference to the correctness of her approach as a writer. Charlotte, in contrast, let fly in one of her most bitingly sarcastic moods, addressing her critic as if in a letter. Having first checked with Williams that the
Quarterly's
reviewer was indeed a woman, Charlotte mocked her by echoing her own phrases on the sex of ‘Currer Bell': ‘he feels assured – his heart tells him that the individual who did him the honour of a small notice in the “Quarterly” – if not a woman, properly so called – is that yet more venerable character – an Old Woman'.
²¹
As Currer Bell, Charlotte then went on to treat Miss Rigby's main points, dismissing most of them in a taunting yet flippant way strongly reminiscent of her juvenile writings as Charles Townshend and her ill-advised letter to Hartley Coleridge written all those years ago.

To the most hurtful criticism, that, if a woman, ‘Currer Bell' must have long forfeited the society of her own sex ‘for some sufficient reason', Charlotte responded:

You should see – Ma'am, the figure Currer Bell can cut at a small party: you should watch him assisting at a tea-table; you should behold him holding skeins of silk or Berlin wool for the young ladies about whom he innocuously philanders, and who, in return, knit him comforters for winter-wear, or work him slippers for his invalid-\member/ (he considers that rather an elegant expression – a nice substitute for – gouty foot; it was manufactured exp\r/essly for your refinement) you should
see
these things, for seeing is believing. Currer Bell forfeit the society of the better half of the human race? Heaven avert such a calamity –!

Swinging from heavy-handed sarcasm to positive libel, Charlotte attacked ‘The idea by you propagated, if not by you conceived' that ‘Currer Bell' had been Thackeray's governess. The inhabitants of Mayfair clearly had nothing better to do than to tell or hear some new thing: ‘Who invents the new things for their consumption?' Charlotte demanded. ‘Who manufactures fictions to supply their cravings? I need not ask who vends them: you, Madam, are an active sales-woman; the pages of your “Quarterly” form a notable advertising medium.' Charlotte ended her ‘letter' with a long and flippant discourse on the accuracy of ‘Currer Bell's' descriptions of ladies' dresses and fabrics and closed with a vitriolic flourish.

What a nice, pleasant gossip you and I have had together, Madam. How agreeable it is to twaddle at \ones/ ease unmolested by a too fastidious public! Hoping to meet you one day again – and offering you such platonic homage as it becomes an old bachelor to pay

I am yours very devotedly

Currer Bell

As an afterthought she added a postscript in which the anger and hurt could not be hidden under a frivolous tone and were exposed, naked, for all to see.

N.B. I read all you said about governesses. My dear Madam – just turn out and be a governess yourself for a couple of years: the experiment would do you good: a little irksome toil – a little unpitied suffering – two years of uncheered solitude might perhaps teach you that to be callous, harsh and unsympathizing is not to be firm, superior and magnanimous.