The Secret History of Jane Eyre Read online

  The first page of Charlotte Brontë’s manuscript for Jane Eyre, sent to the publishers Smith, Elder in August 1847. © GRANGER

  For Sissy Seiwald

  How dare I? Because it is the truth.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1: Secret History

  2: The Red-Room

  3: Injustice

  4: The First Girl

  5: A Situation

  6: The Master

  7: Cord of Communion

  8: The Fury

  9: Desolation

  10: Perfect Congeniality

  11: An Independent Woman

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  We begin with a mystery. Let’s imagine that it is October 19, 1847.

  A new book has just been published in London. The first reviews are rapturous.

  On October 23 the Atlas finds the novel has “all the freshness and some of the crudeness of youth about it,” and yet credits the author with a knowledge of “the profoundest springs of human emotion,” the kind of wisdom usually achieved only after “years of bitter experience.” The critic, while enthusiastic, is clearly curious about the identity of the author. Is this writer young or old? Freshly youthful or seasoned by years of difficulties overcome? The review then proclaims that this “is one of the most powerful domestic romances” to have appeared in many years. It’s an innovative work, with “little or nothing of the old, conventional stamp upon it.” Indeed, summing up, the Atlas concludes that this “tale of passion” is “a book to make the pulses gallop and the heart beat, and to fill the eyes with tears.”

  But where did this book—so unlike the work of the known writers of the day—come from?

  Curious readers would find on its laconic title page the following: “Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell.”

  Who were these two people? Even the book’s publisher, Smith, Elder, didn’t know. And was it an “autobiography”? The Atlas called it a powerful domestic romance. Was it fact or fiction?

  The relationship of the publishers at Smith, Elder in London with the author was conducted entirely by post. They found themselves writing to someone from Haworth, a small town in the north of England, who signed correspondence “C Bell”; the replies from London were to be delivered “Under cover to Miss Brontë.”

  For half a year, during months of growing success for the book, the mystery continued. Speculation was rife—A man or a woman? Young or old?—nobody knew who this Bell person was, or whether this was an edited autobiography or a work of fiction.

  Then a disreputable London publisher named Newby floated a rumor that he had the manuscript of a new Currer Bell novel soon to be published. Needless to say this troubled the people at Smith, Elder, who then wrote the author asking what was going on. A day later, two young women from Yorkshire, a little staggered after an all-night train ride, arrived on the morning of Saturday, July 8, 1848, at Smith, Elder’s London offices. Charlotte and Anne Brontë stood before them. Jane Eyre, it seemed, was not an edited autobiography, but a novel, written by Charlotte.

  This was not the end of the story. Charlotte Brontë took her editors into her confidence but insisted on maintaining her identity secret. Despite the efforts of the London literati, she largely succeeded in keeping it a mystery until the end of 1850.

  Then, in a “Biographical Notice” prefacing new editions of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte, in mourning for her lost sisters, divulged that the authors of those two novels were, respectively, Emily Brontë, who had died December 19, 1848, and Anne Brontë, who had died May 28, 1849. In Charlotte’s words, “The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest; circumstances are changed.” The phrase “little mystery” suggests that her wish to conceal her authorship was a playful whim. Actually, matters were far more complicated.

  Now that readers knew that Currer Bell was actually Charlotte Brontë, how much could they learn about her? More to the point, how might one account for the ability of this reclusive young woman, living in isolation in the West Riding of England, to write an utterly new and powerful “tale of passion”? And furthermore, what was the relationship of the author, called “Editor” on the novel’s title page, to the character Jane Eyre?

  Brontë denied that there were significant similarities between her life and that of her first-person narrator and heroine. In a particularly funny episode, as late as May 29, 1851, William Makepeace Thackeray enraged her when at the end of a public lecture he cried out, “Mother, you must allow me to introduce you to Jane Eyre!” Charlotte was so angered by his very public announcement that she was the author of the novel and that the protagonist and narrator were based on her, that she sought out Thackeray the next afternoon to upbraid him. Her publisher, George Smith, accidentally walked in on them as she was dressing down the celebrated author of Vanity Fair and was amazed, as he put it, by “[t]he spectacle of this little woman, hardly reaching to Thackeray’s elbow, but, somehow, looking stronger and fiercer than himself, and casting her incisive words at his head, resembled the dropping of shells into a fortress.”

  The vehemence of her denial was nothing new. Throughout the months after Jane Eyre first appeared, Charlotte persistently lied about her authorship. In May of 1848 her dear friend Ellen Nussey relayed to Charlotte that she heard a rumor that Charlotte had published something. She replied venomously that to say so would be “an unkind and an ill-bred thing.” She insisted that “profound obscurity” was infinitely preferable to a “vulgar notoriety” and that she repelled and denied every such “accusation.” Charlotte’s language voices an angry fear. Why would suggesting she has written a book be an “accusation”? How might being the author of a popular novel imply that she was guilty of something? The “little mystery” appears, at moments such as this, immensely important to Charlotte; important enough for her to threaten Ellen that anyone who says she has published is “no friend of mine.”

  If she was so concerned about preserving her anonymity that she lied about the publication of the novel to close friends, why did Charlotte Brontë write Jane Eyre in the first place? And why was she so keen on maintaining the secret of her relationship to the novel?

  There are many reasons. Perhaps the most important is that this was a book born from a series of calamities that led to a crisis in Brontë’s life: what she called “an almost unbearable inner struggle.” Her heart, “constantly lacerated by searing regrets,” led Brontë to the discovery that “[o]ne suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one’s words too much.” In Jane Eyre Brontë found those words, a way to voice her struggle and her pain. She seized upon those things that had hurt, shamed, angered, and compelled her, as well as those desires that she could not control, and transformed them into a fiction which was so profoundly intimate that this publicly reserved, proper, and proud young woman didn’t want anyone to know they were hers. In the pages that follow, we will learn how and why she did this, and as we do, we will come to understand more completely some of the sources for this novel’s compelling power, something felt by its first readers 170 years ago, and felt still by twenty-first-century readers.

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF

  JANE EYRE

  1

  Secret History

  In the summer of 1846 there was an immediate crisis that ­Charlotte Brontë had to face. Due to cataracts, her father was going blind. In order to understand why this was so calamitous, one must know a little bit about her unusual family.

  Patrick Brontë, as a Church of E
ngland parish priest, enjoyed a small but permanent income; a large rectory that was home for his children, sister-in-law, and servants; and the social status that made him a leader in his community. His wife had died early, as had the two oldest girls, leaving only his sister-in-law to help raise the four surviving children.

  As they grew, the Brontë children—Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell—enjoyed a happy and secure childhood living in the Haworth parsonage. Since there was no suitable school nearby, their father tutored them according to age and ability. They read everything they could get their hands on, indulging in their father’s fairly extensive library and his subscriptions to regional newspapers, as well as national periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh ­Magazine, which they borrowed from friends. Exuberant and playful, the children rambled by themselves in the miles of open moorland beyond their house. Separated by class status from the local people, they lived an isolated life.

  Crucial to all four was the constant writing of fiction and poetry. Its initiation was Patrick’s gift to Branwell in June 1826—a box of toy soldiers. At the time, Charlotte was ten, Branwell nine, Emily eight, and Anne six. The children seized upon these tiny figures as a basis for ever-expanding, collaboratively imagined fantasy worlds. Gathered at a large common table, they wrote stories in pairs: Emily with Anne, Branwell with Charlotte. The children created histories and chronicles—tales of dynastic struggles, romance and reckless bravery—drew maps and, later, portraits of favorite characters, and also wrote magazines about these imagined worlds, which even included pretend advertisements. Because their fiction was supposed to be “by” the toy soldiers, they fashioned tiny manuscripts using a miniscule print that replicated the printed page; these sometimes began with title pages, details about imaginary book publishers, and sale prices. They sedulously stitched together the pages to make toy-sized books and continued producing them until well into their early adult years. From 1827 when she was eleven, until at least 1839 when she was twenty-three, Charlotte shared in this collaborative writing. In the end Charlotte and Branwell produced hundreds and hundreds of pages of pseudo-historical narratives, poetry, and fiction. The emotional intimacy and intensity of this practice offered Charlotte the greatest happiness of her young life. It created an alternative world that she often found far more deeply involving—and in that sense “real”—than everyday experience. The same was true for her brother and sisters.

  When the Brontë children reached maturity, it was time for them to find work to help support the family and their now aging father. In this they failed. Charlotte, when she was nineteen, and Anne, when she was twenty, got brief jobs as governesses; Emily, at twenty, taught for some months in a boarding school for girls, but all soon returned home. Branwell, also at age twenty, tried being a tutor in the home of a clergyman, had a love affair with the lady of the house, and was expelled.

  Back home, they all continued to dream of success as writers, but, with the exception of a few poems by Branwell that appeared in local newspapers, none of them could find publishers for their work. The sisters self-published a collection of their poems. Two copies were sold.

  Now, all of them were threatened by Patrick’s blindness. If ­Patrick lost his eyesight, he lost his post as parish priest, lost the rectory that was the family home, and lost his standing as a leader in the community. And with his children seemingly incapable of earning money, how would they survive? This then was the family crisis.

  As the oldest daughter, Charlotte felt responsible for rescuing the family. She took it upon herself to care for her father’s health: finding him a specialist in Manchester willing to operate on his eyes and setting a date for the operation.

  As Charlotte was managing this and its strain, she was experiencing a second, entirely secret, and intensely personal crisis. Several years earlier, in February 1842, hoping to win financial independence for the family by starting their own school, Charlotte and her sister Emily set off for Brussels to learn French, thinking they could use this skill to attract students. There Charlotte, twenty-six-years old, fell in love with Constantin Heger, the husband of the woman running the school. Returning home in January of 1844, Charlotte began writing passionate letters to him, which first met with an alarmed and distant response, and then silence.

  Haunted by those “searing regrets,” Charlotte took her father to Manchester in August 1846. During the days and weeks following the operation, while her father rested his eyes in an adjoining darkened room, she started writing the novel that would become Jane Eyre.

  As she began to write, what could she have hoped for?

  Certainly money, to fulfill her responsibilities to protect and sustain her family. Indeed, she was to continue to carry on this role until her death. Her younger brother, who should have traditionally taken on this burden, proved incapable of ever holding a paying job. Pride dictated she not speak of these matters with others. Although she was concerned, once she had sold the book, about sales, her contractual relationship with her publisher, and her writing’s commercial success, Charlotte assiduously sought to keep financial matters private.

  The other hope? The further reason for writing?

  As we shall see in detail in Chapter Seven, the secret letters to Constantin Heger probably ended in November of 1845. The unstated hope driving the writing of Jane Eyre, which she began drafting nine months later, was in all likelihood to create a novel of romantic love that would achieve—through imagination—the fantasy fulfillment of an adulterous passion that was never to be hers. But, at least in her novel, Brontë could have her heroine voice her feelings, addressing them not to Heger but to the fictional Fairfax Rochester: “All my heart is yours . . . and with you it would remain were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.” Jane’s words, but Charlotte’s defiant message. Here, certainly, was a strong reason for Brontë to maintain her fierce insistence that she was not the source for her heroine.

  And yet, what else did Charlotte have to draw upon as she began to write this book, given her limited experience of life and of people? Indeed, she saw herself lacking, as she later wrote, that “knowledge of the world, whether intuitive or acquired” enjoyed by the “eminent writers” of the day. How was she to create the highly detailed world of this novel, with its story of dangerous and passionate love, and its spiky, independent-minded, risk-taking heroine?

  She turned inward. Ironically, Jane Eyre was indeed, as the seemingly mysterious title page proclaimed, an autobiography, drawn both from Brontë’s personal experiences and also from a rich and long-standing fantasy life that emerged from the books she had read and the shared writing she and Branwell had created. These should be private matters, and Victorian propriety dictated silence. And yet, because this was really all she had, Brontë had no choice, in the late summer of 1846, but to write about herself.

  She was well aware of what she was doing. In a letter dated November 6, 1847, still using her pseudonym “C Bell,” she discussed the two very different sources she had used for her novel. She was addressing G. E. Lewes, a writer only a year younger than she, whose novel Ranthorpe had just published. In the weeks after Brontë’s novel first appeared, Lewes was preparing a review of Jane Eyre for the December Fraser’s Magazine. This letter is one of the most crucial documents we have telling us how consciously Brontë understood her work as a writer of fiction—and its relationship to her life. She begins by responding to a cautionary observation Lewes had voiced in an earlier, now lost, letter to her. “You warn me to beware of Melodrama” she writes, “and you exhort me to adhere to the real.” Doubtless Lewes had been referring to not only the highly emotional, and hence melodramatic, moments in Jane Eyre but perhaps as well to scenes that stretched the limits of credibility, as when Jane seems to hear Mr. Rochester crying out to her in despair—from a great distance—at the moment when she seems ready to promise marriage to another man. Charlotte argues that her initial intent had been to avoid melodramatic extremes and to write just the so
rt of realistic novel, based on actual experience, which Lewes was exhorting. “When I first began to write,” Brontë recalls, “so impressed was I with the truth of the principles you advocate that I determined to take Nature and Truth as my sole guides and to follow in their very footprints.” And for this reason she carefully “restrained imagination, eschewed romance; repressed excitement . . . and sought to produce something which would be soft, grave and true.” But, she continues, she soon began to worry that to write this way constantly, to be an unremitting realist depending solely on her own experience, particularly given that this experience was “very limited,” not only risked the danger of tedious repetition, but also that the writer might become “an egotist.” Here we see this key anxiety of Brontë’s emerging. She doesn’t wish to push herself too much into the foreground. Though she doesn’t tell this to Lewes, she knows how much of her past life is in her novel and how that could possibly lead not only to tedium but also to exposure, which she feared. And so, rather teasingly, she moves to the second source for her book: not experience, but imagination; not realism, but fantasy. She concedes that a new demand emerged. “Imagination is a strong, restless faculty which claims to be heard and exercised, are we to be quite deaf to her cry and insensate to her struggles? When she shewes us bright pictures are we never to look at them and try to reproduce them?” Here, though she would never dream of revealing the truth, Brontë alludes to the many crucial and powerful moments in Jane Eyre that depict not those things she had experienced, but rather the “bright pictures” of those things she longed for. It’s telling, and significant, that Brontë gives imagination a feminine gender. It is she who is strong and restless, who cries out and struggles to be heard. For Brontë the answer to her rhetorical question is clear: the dreams of desire have their own rights.