Excerpt: The Invention of Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Brontë had a life as seemingly dramatic as her heroine Jane Eyre. Turning her back on her tragic past, Charlotte reinvented herself as an acclaimed author, a mysterious celebrity, and a passionate lover. Doing so meant burning many bridges, but her sudden death left her friends and admirers with more questions than answers.

Tasked with telling the truth about Brontë’s life, her friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, uncovered secrets of illicit love, family discord, and professional rivalries more incredible than any fiction. The result, a tell-all biography, was so scandalous it was banned and rewritten twice in six months—but not before it had given birth to the legend of the Brontës.

In a groundbreaking new biography, scholar Graham Watson presents a different, darker take on one of the most famous women writers of the 19th century. Evaluating key events and introducing new archival material, he challenges the established narrative to reveal the Brontë family as they’ve never been seen before.

In an excerpt from The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, we travel back to the beginning of Gaskell’s journey.

Chapter 1  |  1850: The Great Unknown

By August, the summer had squalled to thunderstorms. Lightning struck northern England, hailing sheets of warm rain to drown the great valleys of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Newspapers described torrents of lightning smashing down entire houses. Those who sheltered under trees reported being burned and blinded by showers of ‘electric fluid’, rain energized by lightning.

Ploughing through the torrential Lake District on a steam train, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell was denied a late summer sunset, and disembarked in unseasonably early darkness. She had come for the week, on the offer of a friend, to meet the country’s most mysterious celebrity, a writer whose true identity was forbidden knowledge. In their holiday home, sheltered by a spinney on a slope above Windermere, she met her hosts Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth and her husband Sir James. After hours in the dusk, Elizabeth was momentarily dazzled by the bright oil lamps and firelight. Once it lifted, there was the third figure, the one she had come to see. At last, here was England’s great enigma: a lady in black at a table set for tea.

One of Elizabeth’s friends encountered her the year before. She repeated what they told her in confidence of how, without even introducing herself, this ‘mysterious visitor … a little, very little, bright haired sprite, looking not above fifteen, very unsophisticated’ demanded an opinion about the novel scandalizing Britain. When told it was first rate, ‘the little Sprite went red all over with pleasure.’ No longer in need of assurances, she stood at once to shake Elizabeth’s hand. Finally, Elizabeth could study Currer Bell, the notorious and, until now, invisible author of Jane Eyre.

After introductions, Elizabeth went upstairs to take off her bonnet and refresh. When she came back down, Currer Bell was self-consciously absorbed in needlework. ‘But I had time for a good look at her,’ she reported to a friend:

She is (as she calls herself ) undeveloped; thin and more than half a head shorter than I, soft brown hair not so dark as mine; eyes (very good and expressive looking straight and open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth and many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad and rather overhanging. She has a very sweet voice, rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort, admirable and just befitting the occasion.

As suspected, Currer Bell was not the man the press made him out to be. Speculation about his sex and class had been a popular by-line for the past three years, since the publication of Jane Eyre in October 1847, when reviewers diluted praise with suspicion. By the standards of the time, the novel’s morals were questionable and, suspecting its author’s name was bogus, critics sought a sex through which to frame their condemnation. A consensus formed that Bell was a northerner, a man, the dominant voice in a family of hot-tempered brothers who wrote three of the most shocking novels of the day: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Opinion split into generalisations. Female critics thought Bell had too much insight into women’s minds to be male, whereas male critics thought him too coarse, with too much carnal experience, to be female. Set outside the rarefied London squares of popular fiction, without lords or duchesses for heroes, Jane Eyre was disdained by one paper as ‘anything but a fashionable novel’. Its reviewer wrote: ‘on the contrary, the heroine is cast amongst the thorns and brambles of life; an orphan, without money, without beauty, without friends, thrust into a starving charity school, and fighting her way as a governess with few accomplishments.’ Unintentionally, they shone a scrutinising light on its hidden author’s life.

Some journalists looked beyond sex and wondered if such an accomplished narrative could have been written by an amateur, or if an already-famous writer was testing them. Enquiries with Jane Eyre’s publisher found even they had been kept in the dark. They had rushed the novel into print only two months after accepting its handwritten manuscript, knowing nothing of its author beyond his name and location; Currer Bell asked for all correspondence to go through a vicarage near Bradford. Yet when they sent press clippings, delivery was delayed because the postmen could not find anyone with that name. ‘It would be better in future not to put the name Currer Bell on the outside,’ came the reply, ‘if directed simply to Miss Brontë they will be more likely to reach their destination safely. Currer Bell is not known in this district and I have no wish that he should.’ This pretence continued for another eight months of near-daily communication until the author was forced to reveal herself in person.

While Elizabeth, with thousands of others, was intrigued by Jane Eyre’s passion and unconventionality, she doubted it was a man’s work. Her friend, fellow writer Harriet Martineau, was convinced knowledge of feminine activities gave them away. ‘Passages about sewing on brass rings could have been written only by a woman—or an upholsterer,’ she observed dryly. Strangely, the deprivations of Jane Eyre’s girlhood were so like Harriet’s that her relatives thought she had written it and teased her to confess. While she could honestly deny it, she began to suspect there might be a spy in her midst, extorting information from confidantes or observing her at close hand to repurpose her life for their fiction. But who?

Harriet was staying with friends in November 1849 when a gift copy of Currer Bell’s new novel, Shirley, came by post. She scrutinised the handwriting in the accompanying note for clues. It looked ‘cramped and nervous’ she surmised, the inelegant hand of a compulsive writer. And what of the writer’s sex? There was a potential slip. They had written: ‘Currer Bell offers a copy of Shirley to Miss Martineau’s acceptance, in acknowledgement of the pleasure and profit she has derived …’ They stopped, inked a line through ‘she’ and replaced it with ‘he’, before continuing ‘has derived from her works’. That settled it: Currer Bell was a woman in disguise. Harriet decided to test her hunch. She had to prove she had worked them out and was discreet. She addressed a reply to ‘Currer Bell Esquire’ but started the letter boldly, risking offence for a potential male recipient, hailing him, ‘Madam …’

At the same time, another copy went to Elizabeth Gaskell. She read it straight away. Catching up with a friend afterwards she realised they might help identify its author. ‘Do you know Dr Epps?’ she asked, remembering he was her father’s friend. ‘I think you do. Ask him to tell you who wrote Jane Eyre and Shirley. Do tell me …’

She must have heard that the homeopath John Epps received a plea for help from William Smith Williams, the editor at Smith Elder & Co. At the beginning of December 1848, Williams told Epps the sister of one of his authors was in an unexplained decline and wondered if he could recommend treatment from a written description of her symptoms. Epps agreed with stipulations: the questioner could not be anonymous, noting that ‘if a lady has not sufficient confidence in him to give her name when consulting him, it cannot be expected that he should give his opinion of her case.’ Within days, Williams passed him a two-page statement describing a woman not yet 30 with ‘a peculiar reserve of character’, emaciated and feverish with seizures of coughing. So far, it said, she had refused all medical attention ‘insisting that Nature shall be left to take her own course’. It was  signed Miss Brontë of Haworth parsonage, near Bradford. Although Epps replied immediately with homeopathic remedies and generalised advice, it was already too late—it would have been too late for twenty-first century medicine—to avert or relieve the final agonizing stage of tuberculosis that killed the author’s sister a few days before that Christmas.

Elizabeth was left guessing. Sensing parts of Shirley were written by someone in the early days of a devastating bereavement she sent Currer Bell her sympathies. Her pity cut through the artifice, winning trust where public praise and blame failed. In the grateful note she received back, she read, ‘Currer Bell must answer Mrs Gaskell’s letter. Whether forbidden to do so or not she must acknowledge its kind, generous sympathy with all her heart.’

She. Her. The mask was lifting, the mystery was unravelling. She was being revealed.

Despite this, the writer—Charlotte Brontë—still withheld her name. Only in the vulnerable moment of using her own voice did its protection fail. She could not deny her grief for the mother and two elder sisters she lost as a child, or her remaining three siblings who all died within eight months of each other, and referred to herself by the shared initials she used for her real and assumed identities. It let her admit the truth:

Dark days she has known; the worst perhaps were days of bereavement, but though CB is the survivor of most who were dear to her, she has one near relative still left, and therefore cannot be said to be quite alone.

Elizabeth’s intuitive sympathy flared through the darkness enclosing Charlotte Brontë. Desperate to force any resemblance between the two sisters she lost in the last eleven months and famous new admirers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, Charlotte turned gratefully to William Smith Williams. ‘It mournfully pleases me to fancy a remote affinity,’ she wrote, straining for any connection. ‘Proud am I that I can touch a chord of sympathy in souls so noble.’

Triumphantly, Elizabeth wrote to her friend Katie, ‘What will you give me for a secret? She’s a she–that I will tell you.’

This set the tone between Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. In the years to come, it would express itself in ways neither could imagine but both were, as if by a sense of precognition, preparing. It was the start of Elizabeth winning intimacies, encouraging this deeply private woman to expose herself in confessions she could read aloud to her family then pass around for her friends’ amusement.

About the author

Graham Watson is a specialist in the Brontës and Elizabeth Gaskell, and he is currently researching Victorian literary identities at the University of Glasgow. He has published a number of papers in Brontë Studies and has recently joined the journal’s peer-review board. This is his first book. Graham lives in Glasgow.