The Bronte Sisters (17 page)

With the truth becoming known, though, and with Anne and Emily gone, Charlotte had less reason to hide. When George Smith and his mother invited her to stay with them in London, she accepted. She hired a dressmaker to sew her a proper city wardrobe—in black, because she mourned. She was earning money from her books and could afford to leave her country dresses at home.

Smith’s mother and sisters welcomed Charlotte politely, and soon their reserve softened into friendship. George Smith escorted Charlotte to art galleries and plays. He hosted a dinner party for her, with William Makepeace Thackeray among the guests. This celebrated novelist, who stood more than six feet tall, had
“a peculiar face—not handsome—very ugly indeed,” Charlotte wrote to her father. Thackeray was “stern in expression,” she added, “but capable also of a kind look.”

Thackeray was struck by Brontë’s “trembling little frame,
the little hand, the great honest eyes.” No one told him of Charlotte’s dual identity, but he figured out who she was. After dinner, when the men joined the women for coffee in the drawing room, as was the custom, he asked her if the “warning fragrance”
of the gentlemen’s cigars had announced their approach, as Edward Rochester had asked Jane Eyre.

Though Charlotte Brontë had dedicated the second edition of
Jane Eyre
to Thackeray, she admitted nothing that night. But she revealed herself a few days later to another celebrated writer, Harriet Martineau. A brilliant woman, Martineau had written books on education, economics, and travel. She had also authored a novel about a doctor,
Deerbrook,
that Charlotte had admired. When Charlotte learned that Martineau was staying with cousins in London, she wrote to request a meeting.

Martineau had read
Jane Eyre
and
Shirley
and had even exchanged notes with Currer Bell. Like many curious readers, she was dying to know Bell’s identity. So she invited Mr. Bell to Sunday tea. “I lighted plenty of candles
that we might see what manner of man or womankind it was, & we sat in wondering expectation,” noted Lucy Martineau, one of Harriet’s cousins.

Just before six there was a loud knock, and a man six feet tall strode into the room. He turned out to be a philanthropist who had come on some brief business, and Martineau wished he would finish it and be gone. No sooner did he leave than a carriage pulled up to the house, and a servant called out loudly, because Harriet Martineau had partial hearing loss, “Miss Brontë.”

“I thought her the smallest creature
I had ever seen (except at a fair),” wrote Martineau, who was tall, robust, and nearing fifty. “And her eyes blazed, as it seemed to me.” Seated beside Martineau on the sofa, Brontë “cast up at me such a look,—so loving, so appealing,—that, in connexion with her deep mourning dress,” Martineau recalled, “I could with the utmost difficulty return her smile, or keep my composure. I should have been heartily glad to cry.” Lucy Martineau volunteered, “She was so pleasant
& so naïve, that is to say so innocent and un Londony that we were quite charmed with her.” After tea the two authors chatted alone, with Brontë speaking loudly into the horn that Martineau held to her ear. Brontë turned “red all over
with pleasure” to hear
Jane Eyre
praised, Martineau said.

Charlotte Brontë went to London again in June 1850. On this trip she and George Smith attended a party at Thackeray’s home. Determined more than ever to make her reveal her secret, Thackeray introduced her to his other guests as Currer Bell. Charlotte corrected him smartly. According to another guest, she said that she “believed there were books
being published by a person named Currer Bell . . . but the person he was talking to was Miss Brontë—and she saw no connection between the two.” As soon as she could, Charlotte fled the drawing room, where the guests had gathered, and sat in the study with the Thackerays’ governess. Miss Brontë “did not look pleasant,”
Thackeray’s daughter Anne Ritchie recalled decades later. “I remember how she frowned at me whenever I looked at her.”

Brontë also saw her hero, the Duke of Wellington, then eighty-one years old, when Smith took her to the chapel where the great man worshiped on Sundays. Smith and Brontë followed Wellington down the steps when the service ended, and they passed him twice on their morning stroll. “He is a real grand old man,”
Charlotte said. On another day, she had lunch with George Henry Lewes, and he made her angry all over again by saying she had written “naughty books.”
George Smith listened “with mingled admiration and alarm”
to the “explosion” that followed, as Brontë defended her work with “indignant eloquence.” Later she told Ellen Nussey that she had trouble staying annoyed at Lewes, because his face was “so wonderfully like Emily.”

While in London, Brontë sat for a portrait by George Richmond, who had studied art in Paris. Richmond created a flattering likeness of the novelist, emphasizing her soft, thick hair and soulful eyes. Her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls, went with Brontë to pick up the portrait when it was ready. As he admired the finished work, Brontë began to cry. “Oh, Mr. Richmond,
it is so like Anne!” she said. When the portrait reached Haworth, Patrick Brontë declared that Richmond had captured the genius of the author of
Shirley
and
Jane Eyre.
Tabby Ayckroyd had a different opinion, however. She disliked the painting and complained that it made Charlotte look too old.

Charlotte Brontë made other trips that summer. She went to Scotland with George Smith and one of his sisters to pick up a brother who was in school there. She loved Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, and called her days there “as happy almost as any I ever spent.”
On a visit to a family named Kay-Shuttleworth, who had a home in Wordsworth’s Lake Country, she befriended another guest, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Brontë had read and admired Gaskell’s novel
Mary Barton.
And Gaskell, a married woman who had lost a beloved son, had read
Jane Eyre
and
Shirley
and understood that their author, too, had known grief. On boat and country carriage rides, the two women talked about books and life. “She and I quarreled
& differed about almost everything,” Gaskell told another friend, “but we liked each other heartily.” From Haworth Brontë sent Gaskell a “little book of rhymes”:
a copy of
Poems
by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Then, in December, Charlotte spent “a
cosy
winter visit”
with her other new friend, Harriet Martineau, at Martineau’s stone house on Lake Windermere, England’s largest lake. The energetic Martineau raised livestock and grew vegetables on her property. She took Brontë to meet the poet Matthew Arnold, who made a bad first impression. As he walked into the room with his chin held high, Brontë thought him to be self-important. Yet once she knew him better, she changed her mind. “Ere long a real modesty
appeared under his assumed conceit,” she decided. Arnold, for his part, saw Brontë only as “past thirty and plain,
with expressive gray eyes, though.”

Arnold’s moving 1867 poem “Dover Beach” would capture the uncertainty of many Victorians as Darwin’s writings on natural selection forced them to reconsider long-held beliefs:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

One person who had rejected the faith of her forebears was Harriet Martineau. When she read aloud to Charlotte from a book she was writing,
Letters on the Law of Man’s Social Nature and Development,
in which she championed atheism, Brontë hardly knew how to respond. “The strangest thing is
that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank,” reflected Charlotte, who had known so much grief, “to welcome this unutterable desolation as a pleasant state of freedom. Who could do this if he would? Who would do it if he could?”

Charlotte’s own faith remained unshaken, and when her father, Ellen Nussey, and even Miss Wooler chided her for staying in the home of an admitted atheist, she defended her new friend.
“My dear Miss Wooler—I believe if you were in my place, and knew Miss Martineau as I do—if you had shared with me the proofs of her rough but genuine kindness,” she wrote, “you would be the last to give her up; you would separate the sinner from the sin.”