Nom de Plume (4 page)

However much Smith had suspected Currer Bell to be
a woman, at first he could not put two and two together in the presence of
Charlotte Brontë. Utterly stunned, he looked at the letter and at his author and
back again at the letter. It took him a few moments to recover from his shock;
Charlotte tried to suppress a laugh. As the truth dawned on Smith, he received
them graciously—insisting that the sisters extend their London visit and
entertaining them with trips to the opera, art museums, and more. Charlotte
cautioned him that although they had disclosed the truth about their identities,
the revelation should go no further: “To all the rest of the world we must
remain ‘gentlemen' as heretofore.”

Because Smith could not tell anyone who his
companions really were, his family and friends were perplexed as to why he had
brought “a couple of odd-looking countrywomen,” as Charlotte wryly recalled, to
dine with them one evening. They were introduced as “the Misses Brown.” What the
urbane young Londoner was doing socializing with “these insignificant spinsters”
was anyone's guess, but in typical British fashion, no one spoke of it.
Charlotte and Anne were amused at the awkwardness and dazzled by the grandeur of
Smith's family residence.

He later described Anne as “a gentle, quiet, rather
subdued person, by no means pretty, yet of a pleasing appearance.” Though he was
fascinated by Charlotte and awestruck by her intellect, his appraisal of her
appearance confirmed there was no danger of falling in love with his unmasked
author (though her feelings for him were far more complex). For one thing, he
took note of her missing teeth and her ruddy complexion. Also, “Her head seemed
too large for her body. . . . There was but little feminine charm
about her; and of this fact she was herself uneasily and perpetually conscious.”
Charlotte once lamented her “almost repulsive” plainness to her dear friend
Elizabeth Gaskell, but understood that her power lay elsewhere. “Though I knew I
looked a poor creature,” she wrote, “and in many respects actually was so,
nature had given me a voice that could make itself heard, if lifted in
excitement or deepened by emotion.”

She returned home from her London trip tired but
giddy at having unburdened herself. The future seemed full of promise.

Instead, the next year of her life would bring
extraordinary suffering. The dissolute lost soul, Branwell, died in September of
tuberculosis. His sisters never told him about the novels they'd published. In a
letter to W. S. Williams a month after Branwell's death, Charlotte admitted, “I
do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no
consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—but for the wreck of talent, the
ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a
burning and a shining light.”

The worst was still to come. Emily caught a severe
cold at Branwell's funeral and had difficulty breathing. Her health deteriorated
steadily from then on, and she did not leave the house again. She developed
consumption but refused medical treatment, and her behavior became increasingly
erratic; she would not rest or eat and bristled at familial displays of
sympathy. (Charlotte described witnessing her sister's abrupt decline as causing
“pain no words can render.”) Just thirty years old, Emily died on December 19,
1848, at two o'clock in the afternoon. Three days later a memorial service was
held, and her beloved bulldog, Keeper, accompanied the family to the church.
(After her death, he had howled outside her door.) Emily was buried in the vault
of the same church where her mother and brother now lay. Her coffin was only
seventeen inches wide.

“For my part I am free to walk on the moors,”
Charlotte wrote later, “but when I go out there alone—everything reminds me of
the times when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness,
featureless, solitary, saddening—My sister Emily had a particular love for them,
and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry
leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her.” Charlotte did not
think she could go on as a writer: “Worse than useless did it seem to attempt to
write what there no longer lived an ‘Ellis Bell' to read,” she informed her
publisher.

Because Anne had shared a bedroom with Emily, it
was not entirely shocking that in January 1849 Anne was diagnosed with
tuberculosis. She had managed to publish another novel,
The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall
, the year before, but it would be her last.
As if she'd had a presentiment of her death, in the sharply worded preface to
the novel's second edition she boldly defended the need for authorial privacy.
The essay reads almost as a manifesto:

Respecting the author's identity, I would
have it to be distinctly understood that Acton Bell is neither Currer nor Ellis
Bell, and therefore let not his faults be attributed to them. As to whether the
name be real or fictitious, it cannot greatly signify to those who know him only
by his works. As little, I should think, can it matter whether the writer so
designated is a man, or a woman, as one or two of my critics profess to have
discovered. I take the imputation in good part, as a compliment to the just
delineation of my female characters; and though I am bound to attribute much of
the severity of my censors to this suspicion, I make no effort to refute it,
because, in my own mind, I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so
whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are, or should be, written for
both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should
permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or
why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and
becoming for a man.

July 22nd,
1848.

Anne died on the afternoon of May 28, 1849, at
the age of twenty-nine. A lifelong friend of Charlotte later recalled the last
words Anne had uttered to her sister: “Take courage, Charlotte.”

“When my thoughts turn to Anne,” Charlotte said of
her sister, “they always see her as a patient, persecuted stranger,—more lonely,
less gifted with the power of making friends even than I am.” She wrote a poem
in Anne's memory that began, “There's little joy in life for me, / And little
terror in the grave; / I've lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have
died to save.”

In life, Anne had been overshadowed by her sisters
(and her legacy remains so), yet her preface is a deeply captivating personal
document, remarkable for its forcefulness of expression and eloquence. Her
argument is also impossible to refute.

As the only survivor of her siblings, Charlotte was
inconsolable. “Why life is so blank, brief and bitter I do not know,” she wrote.
Her faith sustained her: “God has upheld me. From my heart I thank Him.” She
proceeded with her next novel,
Shirley
, which she
completed in August 1849. “[T]hough I earnestly wish to preserve my incognito,”
she wrote to her editor, “I live under no slavish fear of discovery—I am ashamed
of nothing I have written—not a line.” Still, she thanked him for preserving her
secret.

That
Shirley
is
considered her weakest novel can be forgiven, considering the circumstances
under which it was written. Regardless, it had been a balm for the author, who
admitted to her editor that in the aftermath of enormous losses, work was her
favorite companion: “[H]ereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what
congenial occupation can give.”

It was published in October to mostly respectable
reviews, and Charlotte said that she would have to be a “conceited ape” to be
dissatisfied with them. But the best thing to come of the book's publication was
a warm letter from Elizabeth Gaskell. In response, Charlotte explained, “Currer
Bell will avow to Mrs. Gaskell that her chief reason for maintaining an
incognito is the fear that if she relinquished it, strength and courage would
leave her, and she should ever after shrink from writing the plain truth.” Aside
from keeping up the nom de plume, the sentiments expressed in Charlotte's letter
were completely honest.

Gaskell was delighted at having extracted some
small bit of biographical information from the mysterious author. She excitedly
wrote to a friend: “Currer Bell (aha! What will you give me for a secret?) She's
a she—that I will tell you.”

In 1850, Charlotte's social circle began to widen,
and she met Mrs. Gaskell in person during a visit to the Lake District. “She is
a woman of the most genuine talent,” Charlotte said, “of cheerful, pleasing and
cordial manners and—I believe—of a kind and good heart.” They became close, and
Gaskell's loving and sympathetic (if flawed) biography,
The
Life of Charlotte Brontë
(published in 1857), is still considered one
of the great works of Victorian literature. Gaskell's book was significant for
being the first full-length biography of a woman novelist written by another
woman. The legend, long upheld by scholars and readers alike, of Charlotte as
the saintly sister—dutiful, modest, almost mouselike, and above reproach—can be
traced to Gaskell, who created it.

After the deaths of her sisters, Charlotte made
regular visits to London, where she had the privilege of meeting writers she
admired, including Thackeray. She attended lectures, saw plays, and visited
museums. She even sat for a portrait by the popular artist George Richmond—a
gift from George Smith to Charlotte's father that now resides in London's
National Portrait Gallery, along with Branwell's iconic painting of Emily, Anne,
and Charlotte, circa 1835, with his own image inexplicably blurred out of the
portrait.

Even as she extended herself beyond Haworth,
Charlotte remained discreet about her alter ego. She railed against “vulgar
notoriety,” yet speculation was rampant. She was even openly confronted, though
she tried to brush such incidents aside. One evening, at a dinner party at
Thackeray's home, the author called Charlotte “Currer Bell” in front of the
other guests. She was not amused. “I believe there are books being published by
a person named Currer Bell,” she said curtly, “but the person you address is
Miss Brontë—and I see no connection between the two.” (Thackeray had himself
used various noms de plume in his early works, including Michael Angelo
Titmarsh, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, and Charles James Yellowplush.)

Charlotte was also on the defensive with George
Lewes, who had initially praised her work, offering advice and encouragement,
but who began lecturing “Bell” sternly in his letters and then maligning the
author in reviews. She entered reluctantly into what became a rather contentious
correspondence. It seems bizarre that the man who would become George Eliot's
most passionate supporter just a few years later would engage in reductive
criticism on grounds of gender, but he did. “I wish you did not think me a
woman,” she wrote to him in 1849. “I wish all reviewers believed ‘Currer Bell'
to be a man; they would be more just to him. You will, I know, keep measuring me
by some standard of what you deem becoming to my sex; where I am not what you
consider graceful, you will condemn me.” She went on: “I cannot when I write
think always of myself—and of what is elegant and charming in femininity—it is
not on those terms or with such ideas I ever took pen in hand; and if it is only
on such terms my writing will be tolerated—I shall pass away from the public and
trouble it no more. Out of obscurity I came—to obscurity I can easily
return.”

Lewes ignored her response, reviewing
Shirley
in the
Edinburgh
Review
and finding fault with the work based on the author's gender.
(The headlines of the article's first two pages read, “Mental Equality of the
Sexes?” and “Female Literature.”) Charlotte was outraged and hurt by what she
viewed as his cruelty toward her, and at having her fiction judged by a double
standard. The note she subsequently addressed to “G. H. Lewes, Esq.” was damning
and brief: “I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my
friends.” It was signed “Currer Bell.” (About a year later, after Charlotte met
him in person, she said, “I cannot hate him.”)

At home as well, her secret had begun to unravel.
Her father had started telling neighbors who his daughter was. Excited fans made
pilgrimages to the village, hoping to come upon the genius in person. And on
February 28, 1850, a local newspaper announced, in a burst of pride, that
Charlotte Brontë, the reverend's daughter, was “the authoress of
Jane Eyre
and
Shirley
, two
of the most popular novels of the day, which have appeared under the name of
‘Currer Bell.'” The charade was officially over.

In 1851, thirty-five-year-old Charlotte received
the third marriage proposal of her life and the third she would decline. (When
the latest suitor approached her to propose, Charlotte admitted, “my veins ran
ice.”) Caring for her aging father, and suffering from health problems of her
own, including a liver infection, she was lonely—but she didn't want a
husband.

Discouraging her further was the news that despite
all her success, Smith, Elder still declined to publish
The
Professor.
The firm suggested that she instead begin work on a new
novel, and she did—often in a state of despair. Two years later,
Villette
was published. The title page read, “
VILLETTE. BY CURRER BELL, AUTHOR OF
‘
JANE EYRE,
' ‘
SHIRLEY,
'
ETC.
” Feeling burned after
having her pseudonymous cover unmasked, Charlotte longed to become invisible
again. She had asked George Smith if he might consider publishing
Villette
under yet another pen name: “I should be much
thankful for the sheltering shadow of an incognito,” she implored. But “Currer
Bell” was now an enviable brand in Victorian society; “he” was a towering figure
whose name on a book almost guaranteed sales. The publisher reluctantly denied
her request.