The Invention of Charlotte Brontë E-Book

Graham Watson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 521

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Heartbreaking … Fascinating … Unbearably poignant.' - Daily Mail 'Dramatic … Sensational ... Closely researched and compulsively readable.' - The Lady 'Meticulously researched, erudite and utterly engaging … Magnificent.' - Karen Powell, author of Fifteen Wild Decembers Novelist, sister, celebrity, wife, daughter: Charlotte Brontë played many roles. As the beloved author of Jane Eyre, she is one of the most radical talents of the nineteenth century. And one of the most mysterious. Based entirely on rarely seen private letters, this radical and moving biography sheds new light on the dramatic events of Brontë's turbulent last years of grief, fulfilment and tragedy – and exposes the astonishing media scandal that followed her early death, when her friends and family battled to control how history would remember her.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Invention of Charlotte Brontë

‘Deeply researched … Watson provides a riveting account of Gaskell’s intrepid ferreting out of witnesses to Brontë’s early life, many of whom had their own agendas in shaping her image – as did Gaskell … A brilliant reappraisal of a much-chronicled life. An essential addition to the vast shelf of Brontëana.’

Kirkus Starred Review

‘Exceptional. The writing is superb and so evocative. An absolutely wonderful book. I’d recommend it to anyone, whether a Brontës fan or not.’

Carol Ann Lee, author of Roses from the Earth: The biography of Anne Frank

‘Combines diligent archival research and clear narrative skill.’

The Irish Times

‘This myth-busting juggernaut challenges what we think we know about Charlotte Brontë … A fascinating and refreshing approach.’

Brontë Babe Blog

‘Exceptional research, and the most engaging prose. A fascinating read … Doppelganger by Naomi Klein and The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson may not seem likely bedfellows, but the themes of false or mistaken identity, of social hysteria, creativity, anger, and ultimately of bravely claiming back the truthful essence of oneself, as well as that of the time and society in which we live can be found in both. Highly recommended.’

Essie Fox, author of Dangerous

‘Engaging and revealing, this meticulously researched book deepens our understanding of the Brontës, offering both intellectual and humanising perspectives.’

Elisabeth Basford, author of Princess Mary

‘One great strength is Watson’s attentiveness throughout to the psychological complexities … [and] succeeds in conveying a sense of the great, unalleviated grief as well as burning female anger.’

Brontë Studies

‘Insightful and pacy, Watson’s meticulously researched biography holds good on the promise of the title … it is refreshing … Watson is not afraid to wade into controversial waters … A must-read for those who seek the truth behind half-truths and speculation.’

Emma Conally-Barklem, author of Hymns from the Sisters

‘A fascinating insight into the public afterlife of one of the nineteenth century’s most important novelists.’

The Albion Review

Instagram readers’ reviews

‘Staggering, beautiful, immersive, moving – and thoroughly and diligently researched.’

@emilyrossinsta

‘Gripping … A fascinating and eye-opening narrative as readable as a novel.’

@katrina_m_robinson

‘Moving … Eloquent and meticulous … Compelling … Not just a biography; it’s a celebration of creativity, perseverance, and the indomitable spirit of a woman who defied the odds to leave an indelible mark on literature.’

@annathebooksiread

‘Hooked me from the start … A perfect read.’

@historian_ellis

‘Brilliantly written … That this is a debut is astounding. Insightful, well-researched and flows from the page.’

@vickipope1971

‘Admirable … Careful and painstaking … Thoroughly riveting.’

@redroomreflections

‘Moving … A poignant and thought-provoking account.’

@History_is_so_last_century

‘Watson plays myth buster leaving no stone unturned to uncover the truth about one of the most iconic authors of all time … A masterful and thorough investigation … Invigorating and convincing.’

@gothicbookworm

Cover images: © The University of Manchester / W.M. Hunt Collection.

First published 2024

This paperback edition published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Graham Watson, 2024, 2025

The right of Graham Watson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 538 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall

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For my motherElizabeth McDermott Watson(1946–2023)

‘The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes …’

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth

‘Every book, as we know, has its secret history, hidden from the world.’

T.W. Reid, Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph

Contents

Acknowledgements

Part One: Visiting (1850–1854)

Chapter 1: The Great Unknown

Chapter 2: Wild, Strange Facts

Chapter 3: A Passionate Life

Chapter 4: A Tigress Before Calamity

Chapter 5: Eclipse

Chapter 6: Debatable Land

Chapter 7: Treachery

Chapter 8: Providence

Part Two: Departing (1854–1857)

Chapter 9: A Strange and Perilous Thing

Chapter 10: Spring Flowers

Chapter 11: A Grave Duty

Chapter 12: The Promised Land

Chapter 13: Treason

Chapter 14: The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Chapter 15: That Unlucky Book

Part Three: Remaining (1857–1896)

Chapter 16: Fugitive Pieces

Chapter 17: Resurgam

Epilogue

A Chronology of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

First thanks must go to those scholars whose research and writing on the Brontës and Elizabeth Gaskell are of inestimable value: primarily Dr Christine Alexander, Dr Juliet Barker, John Chappelle and Arthur Pollard; Winifred Gerin, Dudley Green, Margaret Smith, Prof Patsy Stoneman, Dr Jenny Uglow, and the incomparable Ann Dinsdale, whose generosity and dedication make her my hero. All who write about the Brontës owe these specialists a considerable debt. Sincerest thanks also to those institutions who kindly granted permissions for the reproduction of their material.

At The History Press, I’m deeply grateful to Claire Hartley, whose judgement and vision made this book a reality, to Rebecca Newton for steering it towards publication, and to my editor Gaynor Haliday for her acute insights and meticulous attention to detail.

I’m thankful to those friends and family who listened to me bring the Brontës into otherwise normal conversations: Elaine Cartney, Claire Michie, Dr Amber Pouliot, Claire Woodmore.

Finally, thanks to my beloved friend Jennie Hood, who was first to read this book. It couldn’t have had a fiercer champion.

And to Craig Turner for his inexhaustible enthusiasm, love and support, for being a sounding board for all this and more.

Part One

Visiting

(1850–1854)

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 energised by lightning.1

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 scandalising Britain. When told it was first rate, ‘the little sprite went red all over with pleasure.’2 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.3

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.’4 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.’5 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.6 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 …’7

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.8 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.’9 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.10Although 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 agonising 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.’11

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.12

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.’13

Triumphantly, Elizabeth wrote to her friend Katie, ‘What will you give me for a secret? She’s a she – that I will tell you.’14

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.

‘This place is exquisitely beautiful,’ Charlotte Brontë wrote to her father, the elderly vicar of Haworth, ‘though the weather is cloudy, misty and stormy – but the sun bursts out occasionally and shows the hills and the lake. Mrs Gaskell is coming here this evening …15

She was dejected, having hitherto avoided the Kay-Shuttleworths until their promise of Elizabeth swayed her. Keen to collect celebrities, they courted her from the moment they heard she was Currer Bell and flooded her with letters and invitations, unaware how demanding attention exhausted her, then travelled to Yorkshire on what Charlotte wearily described as ‘the wise errand of seeing the scenery described in Jane Eyre and Shirley’.16 They were not alone. Charlotte had already noticed sightseers appearing in the village, while others she did not notice were slipping her father’s sexton half a crown to point her out in church.17

The revelation reached the Kay-Shuttleworths, as it did many in England, as whispers that swept from district to district. Rumours spread through the West Riding for twelve months, filtering into newspapers then back into public conversations as more and more readers recognised the originals of places, institutions, even individuals described in Currer Bell’s two bestsellers.

What started as Charlotte and her sisters’ project of assumed identities and opposite pronouns was threatening her provincial reality. As children, she and her younger siblings – her brother Branwell and sisters Emily and Anne – played the chroniclers of secret countries colonised by celebrity politicians, jostling with queens and statesmen of their own invention, voicing narratives, poems and works of pseudo-biography and history. This repurposing of reality began with toy soldiers and ended with the sisters publishing a poetry collection and novels under fictitious names: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The inner and outer worlds of their lives never merged until Shirley blew the charade apart.

Over the Christmas and New Year period of 1849–50, Charlotte had one of her best friends staying with her. Ellen Nussey was the twelfth child of a local cloth manufacturing family in diminishing fortunes, a meek, vivacious young woman whose eighteen-year friendship with Charlotte began when they were homesick teenagers boarding in a school run by Margaret Wooler, a benevolent spinster still friends with both. ‘She makes me indolent and negligent,’ Charlotte wrote, rescued with happy relief from depression, ‘I am too busy talking to her all day to do anything else.’18

Unexpectedly, Ellen received a letter forwarded from home. It was from her local vicar. ‘You are on a visit with the renowned Currer Bell,’ he announced, ‘The great unknown of the present day.’19 He wanted a favour. He recognised characters in Shirley as men and women in his parish and was certain he and his sister were among them with no disguise as a vicar and his sister. They had a right to know who wrote it, the Rev. Heald insisted, after all ‘I had no idea I should ever be made a means to amuse the public.’ Ellen was culpable, he suggested, having introduced him to Charlotte at a church service. At the time, he left Charlotte feeling he would reckon a dog more able to write a book than she. But for Heald, everything was different now the rumours sounded true. He told Ellen if she confirmed who Currer Bell was he would keep it quiet. If not, he would share his suspicions with everyone. After all, he concluded ominously, one should be wary of those amongst us taking notes, ready to reveal more than they should. ‘Best wishes of the season to you and C.B.,’ he added, closing with a faintly menacing tone to leave her in no doubt he knew precisely where she was, ‘Give my best respects to Mr Brontë …’20

The net was closing. By the first months of 1850, Charlotte felt that only she was still keeping her secret. ‘I thought I should escape identification in Yorkshire. I am so little known,’ she confided to Williams, trying to nullify similarities between herself and her material. ‘It would be difficult to explain to you how little actual experience I have had of life, how few persons I have known and how very few have known me.’21 The world had not given her enough, she suggested, to be fabricated into fiction.

Shortly after Ellen left, the rumours reached Charlotte personally. One day in January, her father’s saturnine Irish curate, 29-year-old Arthur Bell Nicholls, approached her ‘cold and disapproving’, to ask if what he heard about her in Keighley was true.22 If it was, he told her, she should know he had read Jane Eyre and now wanted ‘the other book’, Shirley, little suspecting he too was a character in it. Charlotte must have admitted it was true, for by the end of the month he was reading it in fits of laughter, ‘clapping his hands and stamping on the floor’, sharing the clerical set-pieces with Charlotte’s bemused father. Arthur was delighted, she told Ellen in relief, and thankfully pleased with her depiction of him as ‘decent, decorous, and conscientious’.23

Like his fictional counterpart, Arthur taught in the Sunday School at weekends and in the village school during the week. ‘Being human, of course he had his faults … Otherwise he was sane and rational, diligent and charitable.’24 Taciturn and reserved until now, he could hardly fail to be flattered at being praised so unexpectedly and so publicly. If he ever wondered what Charlotte thought of him, now he knew. As did the rest of the western world.

He lived across the lane from the Brontës, lodging with their nearest neighbours, John Brown and his family. As the sexton and memorial stonemason, Brown was responsible for church maintenance, ringing its bells, digging new graves for the dead then carving and erecting their headstones. This brought all the village families to his workshop in a barn opposite the Brontës’ back scullery, a prime location to hear the parson’s family business. And although Jane Eyre kept him up all night, he never suspected who had written it, until he came home with an ‘astounding declaration’: Currer Bell was none other than the parson’s shy daughter, Charlotte.25 He heard about it 10 miles away in Halifax, his daughter, 22-year-old Martha, explained to Charlotte. She had been running errands for the family since she was 8, before she moved in as a servant at 13 to help their elderly cook, Tabitha Aykroyd. A few days after the Browns heard Arthur roaring with laughter in his room over Shirley, Martha interrupted Charlotte to ask if she really was the author of ‘the grandest books that ever was seen’, as she described them. Charlotte fell into a cold sweat as Martha explained her father told them he knew three other influential Bradford men who heard the same. With a famous writer somewhere in their midst, the men were donating copies of Jane Eyre and Shirley to the new lending library a few minutes’ walk from the Brontës’ front door.26 Soon her characters would be scrutinized by the locals who inspired them. While Arthur was flattered, she knew his hapless colleagues would be upset or angry enough to hold her to account. ‘God help, keep and deliver me!’ she wrote to Ellen.27

But the press was already on to her. Two weeks later, she was exposed in a national newspaper. On Thursday, 21 February the London Morning Post reported:

It is understood that the only daughter of the Rev. P Brontë, incumbent of Haworth, is 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.28

The regional papers picked up the story and repeated it over the following weeks into March. By April, the London papers had more. Reports reached them from an American source that all three Bells were not brothers but sisters.29 The story was broken by The Boston Weekly Museum, on 9 February:

We are assured that a Miss Brontë is the authoress of Jane Eyre and Shirley. She is the survivor of three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, who each have been before the public under the assumed name of Bell. Emily and Anne both died of consumption, but Charlotte remains.

The paper followed it up with a reader’s letter confirming everything. It came from a weaver who migrated to Massachusetts four years before.30 Having recognised locations and persons in both novels Johnathan Berry no longer doubted the author’s identity. He had been a mill child, he explained, ‘born and bred within a stone’s throw’ of the house of the vicar who baptised him, Patrick Brontë. ‘I know some of the characters in Shirley as well as I know my own father … The authoress is young … the public may expect much more from her.’31

Charlotte’s guise of concealment and assumed names was over. Without her siblings, she faced public scrutiny alone. She sent Ellen a clipping of Berry’s letter. It ‘amused and touched’ her, she said, ‘for it alludes to some who are in this world no longer … you will find it a curious mixture of both truth and inaccuracy.’32

The London papers lifted these new specifics and let the regionals distribute them through the counties. As Haworth and the Brontës were described to all, the public wanted to experience the landscape of their novels for themselves. Many wanted more: to visit the church, the parsonage, even to see Charlotte herself. Generally, she deterred them, largely from social nervousness but also certain she would disappoint anyone hoping to meet her avatars, Jane Eyre or Currer Bell. Nevertheless, when those around her obliged, she struggled to refuse.

Among the insistent was Lady Kay-Shuttleworth. She made it clear she and her husband wanted to absorb her into their circle. When they offered to drop by one Friday in early March, Charlotte submitted, warning them it would be ‘so little worth your while’ they need not bother.33 They ignored that and appeared at her door. To her surprise they were younger than she expected, friendly and seemingly without pretensions. Charlotte’s father was enamoured, more so when they restated their offer to Charlotte of a holiday at Gawthorpe Hall, their Elizabethan manor near Burnley. When invitations came by letter, Charlotte could use her father as a justification not to leave home, but if made in person, as perhaps the Kay-Shuttleworths suspected, ‘Papa took their side at once’ and ‘would not hear of my refusing; I must go – leaving me without plea or defence.’ She objected when they wanted to take her immediately but promised to come the following week, then went reluctantly, feeling their generosity incurred a debt of obligation. It was ‘always a difficult and painful thing to me,’ she confided to Williams, ‘to meet the advances of people whose kindness I am in no position to repay.’34

Before going to see them a second time, in Windermere that August, she told Ellen she was so dreading it she would only stay a few days. ‘I consented to go with reluctance – chiefly to please Papa whom a refusal on my part would have much annoyed.’ Leaving him behind tortured her with anxiety. He had been ill for about four weeks, complaining of chronic bronchitis and weakness, without growing weaker. They were the last, lost-feeling survivors of a family of six, decimated by tuberculosis, giving both cause to fear the imminent loss of the other. ‘Grief is a double-edged sword,’ Charlotte explained, ‘it cuts both ways – the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another.’35 The onset of a cold at the start of July brought her fevers and chills that reminded her father of the first symptoms of her sisters’ terminal declines. ‘I am rather prone to look at the dark side of things and cunningly to search out for it, and find it,’ he told Ellen when Charlotte stopped off at hers on her way back from London. Evidently, reading between the lines of a letter Ellen sent him saying Charlotte was unwell, he became uneasy yet tried to be rational. ‘Tell Charlotte to keep up her spirits. When once more she breathes the free exhilarating air of Haworth, it will blow the dust and smoke and impure malaria of London out of her head and heart.’36 Three days later, Charlotte had no sooner reached Haworth when her cab was stopped in the valley by the ingratiating village stationer, John Greenwood. He told her he was sent to fetch her from Ellen’s because her father was so worried. Once home, the household was in distress:

Papa had worked himself up to a sad pitch of nervous excitement and alarm – in which Martha and Tabby were but too obviously joining him – I can’t deny it but I was annoyed; there really being small cause for it all.37

Managing her father’s ‘great discomposure’ was not new. She told Ellen she realised his anxiety had two roots: that he would lose her to either death or marriage. Without bitterness, she assured him there was little prospect of the latter, despite his suspicions she was secretly receiving ‘some overtures’ and being ‘somehow’ about to marry. For a peaceful life by her father’s rule, she accepted her prospects were binary; to avoid distressing him she must stay alive but stay alone. The message was clear. Death would be welcomed before a suitor.

Ellen urged Charlotte to stay as long as possible in the Lake District.38 The journey from Haworth was long and arduous, requiring four trains and hansom cabs at either end. Sir James collected her at Windermere and she spent her first evening at Briery Close looking forward to meeting Elizabeth after a year of writing to each other.

The Kay-Shuttleworths had brought their entire household for the autumn. Here, Charlotte found Lady Janet to be ‘a little woman 32 years old with a pretty, smooth, lively face’, frank, good-humoured and without the airs she detected in James Kay, a doctor who adopted Lady Janet’s aristocratic surname when they married. Charlotte thought he had the intellectual gravity his wife lacked, but an irascibility saved by her graciousness.39 Their four children (a fifth would arrive in 1851) were corralled by a charismatic German-Polish governess, Rosa Poplawska, a woman with possessive designs on Lady Janet, watching her, a family friend noticed, as a cat watches a mouse.40 When she and Charlotte saw each other ‘she was almost as pleased to see me as if we had been related,’ Charlotte told Ellen. They first met at Gawthorpe when the Kay-Shuttleworths hoped Charlotte would be impressed by their estate, their standing and conspicuous wealth. Seeing beyond the castellations and shields, Charlotte flinched at the spectacle of a governess surrounded by small children. For here was the woman she had once been, before she won the celebrity that now attracted the class of people who once employed her as an ignorable underling. A governess, without prospects or means, had to separate herself from her family and migrate into the friendless territory of live-in role between servants and masters, respected by neither. Talking with Rosa confirmed a kinship Charlotte could not feel with Sir James or Lady Janet, despite their generosity towards her (and to Rosa, in fact). Meeting again at Briery Close, Charlotte was glad to see she was better treated than she herself had been and that the children, at least, liked her enough to co-operate, making ‘great alleviations of the inevitable evils of her position’.41

Elizabeth came the next evening, Tuesday, 20 August. ‘Of course, we went to bed; and of course we got up again,’ she wrote in summary.42 Janet was unwell, so stayed in her room all week. Practised in running a large household, Elizabeth took over and made breakfast. On Wednesday, the first morning she and Charlotte had together, they were joined by another of the Kay-Shuttleworths’ friends, Rev. Henry Moseley, previously a professor of philosophy and astronomy at King’s College until James made him one of England’s first school inspectors. After breakfast he joined them for a sail on the lake, where they talked about modern architecture, art criticism and Cardinal Newman’s opinions on Catholicism. Before he left, he wondered if they had heard that Tennyson was nearby, honeymooning with his new bride at Coniston Water. James knew him slightly so proposed a visit after dinner. Being a fan with connections through mutual friends, Elizabeth was enthusiastic. Charlotte was not. Her lukewarm response might have looked like a lack of regard for his poetry, but the truth was more personal. Unknown to the others, she had introduced herself to him before and met his discouraging silence.

A few years earlier, she had sent him a remaindered copy of the poetry book she self-published with her sisters. Cringing with self-deprecating humour that they had been ‘heedless’ to go against the advice of ‘respectable’ publishers, Charlotte, with false-sounding resignation, wrote that as no one wanted or needed it, the stock would be recycled. Out of gratitude for his own work she saved him a copy, she said, unaware how unappealing she made it sound. Phrase for phrase she told at least six other well-known writers the same. Far from writing it off, she was trying to promote it, fishing to be discovered by a great man of letters. The books were never planned to be pulped and just over a year later she used similarly feigned resignation to encourage Smith Elder & Co into taking the stock and reissuing it in a new edition. No one replied to her six near-identical notes, yet Tennyson never threw his away and nearly half a century later it resurfaced in the pages of a memoir by his son. He remembered his father always had ‘the highest admiration’ for the Brontë sisters.43 But as Charlotte never heard from him, she read his silence as disdain and recoiled from being revealed as Currer Bell in person. While she withdrew, Elizabeth made plans.

Charlotte changed the subject at dinner when one of the Kay-Shuttleworth children refused to eat. Addressing him in a low voice she said she would have been grateful for a little piece of bread at his age.44 When someone asked what she meant, she talked about how she and three of her sisters were sent to a brutal boarding school where they were fed scraps hardly fit for animals.45 Her eldest sisters died as a result, she said, it was all in Jane Eyre, and she could not have imagined such a hell had she not experienced it. Regardless of any exaggeration, Elizabeth noted, Charlotte was undeniably still suffering ‘in heart and body from the consequences of what happened there’.46

Dinner over, James shut Elizabeth and Charlotte into a landau and directed them into the rain. They made little progress until the driver called it off and turned them back. Thwarted and furious, Elizabeth said nothing and ‘held my piece and bit my lips’, writing that James wasted their time on similar wet expeditions, pointing out vague mountains through the rainy carriage windows.47 His well-intentioned but misjudged hosting satisfied neither woman. By deciding what was best for both, he only ensured Elizabeth was denied making new connections and Charlotte, who shrank from that, was barred from solitary walks. Both politely complied, but Charlotte especially felt more frustration than enjoyment. A captive guest, she was obliged to suppress her instinct for solitude and tried to discourage the role James was casting for her, as a celebrity he could boast enviable access to. She kept guarded, suspecting writers like herself and Elizabeth made him self-conscious. Eighteen years after publishing his own book, about Manchester mill workers, he felt he had missed his vocation as a social novelist and was critical of theirs. He lectured Charlotte ‘on the faults of the artist class’ to which she belonged and told them writing fiction demeaned women, leading some into indecency.48 Only one writer in the room had been charged with that: her. They all knew The Spectator said this when it reviewed Jane Eyre. Charlotte replied that offending conventionality was an occupational hazard for writers of either sex. It was the natural consequence of an imagination working to the best of its capabilities, she said. Acting quickly to rebalance the exchange, Elizabeth said authors should not be held accountable unless the coarseness was provocative. It sounded like diplomacy yet she said it again years later when she defended Charlotte for being ‘utterly unconscious’ of impropriety. ‘I do not deny for myself the existence of coarseness here and there in her works, otherwise so entirely noble. I only ask those who read them to consider her life … and to say how it could be otherwise.’49

Charlotte would not be stalled. As a writer, she told James, she asserted both her right to express herself as she wished, and to appeal to the higher authority that granted her capabilities. Elizabeth remembered her saying, ‘I trust God will take from me whatever power of invention or expression I may have, before He lets me become blind to the sense of what is fitting or unfitting to be said!’50 If Charlotte’s hand was guided by God, those who condemned her must be in moral darkness, James concurred. Elizabeth was impressed. She thought her rebuke perfectly judged, mighty without being petty, judicious without being personal. Despite her shyness and sense of insignificance, Charlotte could rise with controlled ferocity when challenged. ‘She is sterling and true,’ Elizabeth observed, ‘and if she is a little bitter she checks herself … the wonder to me is how she can have kept heart and power alive in her life of desolation.’51

The next day, Thursday, 22 August, James announced the last excursion of the week, an evening with the Arnold family at their house a mile from Harriet Martineau’s, on the incline of Lough Rigg Fell. To Charlotte’s regret, Harriet was away (‘to avoid the constant influx of visitors,’ she noted), so escape was impossible.

The Arnolds were not only old friends of the Kay-Shuttleworths but of the Gaskells too, making Charlotte the only stranger in the company. She was ‘frightfully shy’, Elizabeth observed, ‘and almost cries at the thought of going among strangers’ but she was particularly apprehensive at the prospect of being shown off that night when even assurances from James that there would be less than half a dozen other people brought her incapacitating headaches.52 Mary Arnold was the widow of the pioneering educationalist Dr Thomas Arnold, and of their six surviving children, Matthew – third eldest like Charlotte, and seven years her junior – had already achieved an exemplary academic career, a literary apprenticeship with Wordsworth, and an acclaimed volume of verse. He was a comparable opposite to Charlotte, a living demonstration of the trajectory her own life could have taken had she been born into another class and another sex.

They arrived just before dark. Charlotte felt sick with nerves. Flinching at anything less than excessive warmth, she found Mary Arnold unwelcoming, exposing her to strangers keen to scrutinise her. One of Mary’s daughters lived to be 90 and still remembered that evening when she was interviewed in 1910. Frances, longest lived of the household, never married and succeeded her mother as matriarch until her own death in 1923. Revealingly, she recalled her family had not invited James or his guests, but that he had sent them an offer to show off his new celebrity friend, Currer Bell. Despite knowing how painful this was for Charlotte, he arranged to trade her anguish for his social cache. Until then, Elizabeth wondered if Charlotte’s anxiety was congenital or neurotic. Now she realised James had set them up and her vulnerability to humiliation came from situations just like this where, duped or compromised, she had to act against self-preservation.

Sixty years on, Frances Arnold remembered they waited for Charlotte in the drawing room and watched her arrive looking exhausted and frightened. Just as she appeared to sink from the weight of their collective stares, everyone was distracted. In a burst of conviviality, Elizabeth took command. She assumed the role of the vivacious guest of honour, took a chair by the fire and began to regale the whole room with anecdotes. The guests laughed. Charlotte slipped out of sight.53

Frances remembered Charlotte invited her to sit beside her and was ‘most affectionate’. They thought Elizabeth ‘the most beautiful woman of the party … She possessed the most joyous disposition which could make itself at home anywhere.’ Charlotte, at home nowhere, realised her silence had been filled, her deficiencies compensated and the attention she loathed swept away. Deftly, majestically, Elizabeth had saved her and the evening before they could falter. ‘I was truly glad of her companionship,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘She is a woman of the most genuine talent – of cheerful, pleasing and cordial manners and – I believe – of a kind and good heart.’54

On their way back to Briery Close, Charlotte mentioned Mrs Arnold’s cold reception but was told she ought not to take formality personally. She would change her mind by the time she met her again four months later, once familiar with her on the terms she preferred, having read about her. Away from drawing rooms filled with expectant guests, she could tower over Mrs Arnold in a territory she ruled as a shrewd and imperious reader. In the sealed, completed world of a biography of Dr Arnold, where there were no mixed signals brought by awkward handshakes, Mrs Arnold shone as a dutiful support and an attentive mother. Had Charlotte read it before they met, she accepted, she would have given her the benefit of the doubt and gained more than she had from the evening.55 As was her habit, Charlotte had reacted, reflected, and then seen things differently.

When not stalled in carriages on sodden hill tracks or shown off in candle-lit parlours, Elizabeth and Charlotte found time to talk alone. ‘She and I quarrelled and differed about almost everything,’ Elizabeth reflected. ‘She calls me a democrat and cannot bear Tennyson – but we like each other heartily, I think, and I hope we shall ripen into friends.’56 Her warmth and sympathetic intelligence drew Charlotte out from her silence, encouraging candour with good-humoured understanding. Unlike with James, their disagreements required no speeches of self-justification. To Elizabeth, Charlotte was a curiosity; mercurial, paradoxical and barely socialised, yet had somehow produced one of the boldest works of literature in recent times. None of it made sense.

Their rooms looked across Lake Windermere to the blue peaks in the west. Taking it in together, she noticed how Charlotte studied the sky, reading cloud formations for coming weather. Having heard from Janet that Charlotte came from a village ‘of a few grey stone houses perched up on the north side of a bleak moor’, she commented it must remind her of home.57 Charlotte said it did, except home felt very different now. She may have explained, as she did to William Smith Williams, that bereavement had ruined it. Her siblings’ hard deaths had atomised their identities into the very earth of Haworth:

I am free to walk on the moors 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. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill country silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it – now I dare not read it.58

In a dream, the orphaned Jane Eyre sees her late mother where the moon would be, parting clouds to whisper consolation. Cut down by grief, it was now Charlotte who searched the sky for solace. Stripped of all who meant anything to her, it was her only friend now, she told Elizabeth – wife, mother, success – who ‘could have no idea what a companion the sky became to anyone living in solitude’. To the lonely, the sky was all-encompassing and faithful and meant more ‘than any inanimate object on earth, more than the moors themselves’.59

Her grief was obliterative, wiping out her family’s shared pasts and futures. Emily and Anne perished ‘of rapid consumption, unattended by any doctor’, she explained (‘Why, I don’t know,’ Elizabeth commented incredulously when she relayed it to a friend). And without a ‘friend or relation in the world to nurse her, and her father dreading a sick room of all places’, Charlotte expected a lonely, pitiful decline of her own. Her depression and fatalism led Elizabeth to conclude she was barely hanging on to what was left of her life, leaving ‘little doubt she herself is already tainted with consumption’.60 Charlotte had gone through ‘suffering enough to have taken out every spark of merriment and [was] shy and silent from the habit of extreme intense solitude’, Elizabeth told her friends. ‘Such a life as Miss B’s I had never heard of until Lady KS described [it].’61

Having shut herself away, Lady Janet hardly features in Elizabeth and Charlotte’s accounts of their stay, yet Elizabeth must have made time to speak with her at length. In the letters she dashed off when she got home, she recounts details from their lengthy conversations carried out behind a closed door. Unknown to Charlotte, they were all about her.

And not for the first time. The subject of Charlotte had come up between them four months earlier, when Elizabeth and Janet first met. Janet asked her if she told her about when Charlotte stayed. ‘No!’ Elizabeth exclaimed in response, ‘I never heard of Miss Brontë’s visit; and I should like to hear a great deal more about her, as I have been so much interested in what she has written.’ Not necessarily the narratives in her novels, she explained, more ‘the glimpses one gets of her, and her modes of thought, and all unconsciously to herself, of the way in which she has suffered. I wonder if she suffers now?’62

She was surprised she might be of use to Charlotte. ‘I am half amused you think I could do her good. I never feel as if I could do anyone good.’ She often needed strength and faith herself, she added, possibly indicating where Janet felt Charlotte’s weaknesses lay, before accepting their personalities might clash. ‘I suppose we all do strengthen each other by clashing together, and earnestly talking our own thoughts and ideas.’63 And yet, her curiosity was impossible to ignore.

Having already met Charlotte’s father, Janet had anecdotes about the family, their home, and how Charlotte’s hard-won successes were almost capsized by their poverty. It was a tale intended to move and it succeeded. It was distressing and, more importantly for a storyteller like Elizabeth, captivating. Here was an extraordinary young woman abandoned by a sequence of bereavements to the grim servitude of a volatile, emotionally absent father. Destitution and grief robbed her of the comforts, safeguards and opportunities most counted on for a start in life. Yet her education, allowance, everything, had to be fought for, with little won in the end. In some ways this sounded like an explanation for Charlotte, an individual so curious to others, so unsocialised and sad, so fierce and frightened, that justifications were offered out of her earshot. As with any unpalatable aspects of Charlotte’s fiction, Elizabeth decided, the sharp and defensive expressions of her personality could only be rationalised by understanding her life. Only then did she make sense. After all, Elizabeth wrote, ‘her faults are the faults of the very peculiar circumstances in which she has been placed.’64

As Elizabeth heard it, the life of Charlotte Brontë was tragic to the point of being almost unbelievable. However, as she would discover, what she heard could hardly be called an exaggeration. To this woman of the most exceptional talents and nature, as Elizabeth described her to friends, for whom comfort, love, recognition and reward were always denied, nothing good had seemingly ever happened.

‘Poor thing,’ Elizabeth reflected, ‘she can hardly smile …’65

Chapter 2

1850

Wild, Strange Facts

‘You said I should stay longer than a week,’ Charlotte told Ellen when she got home, ‘you ought by this time to know me better.’1 Abstemious to a fault, she was proud of taking less than her entitlement and left Windermere on Saturday, 24 August for the empty silence of home, the rank graveyard around it, to books and knitting and her father. After the weekend, she wrote to Elizabeth:

Papa and I have just had tea; he is sitting quietly in his room, and I in mine; storms of rain are sweeping over the garden and churchyard; as to the moors – they are hidden in thick fog. Though alone – I am not unhappy; I have a thousand things to be thankful for, and – amongst the rest – that this morning I received a letter from you, and that this evening – I have the privilege of answering it.2

In contrast, Elizabeth’s house in Manchester resounded with voices and activity. She got back to find her curate husband gone to Birmingham for a few days’ preaching, leaving their daughters with the governess. Bursting to share her impressions of Charlotte and relay everything she heard about her, she went to work. In at least five long letters written over a forty-eight-hour period she repeated Charlotte’s life story as Janet told it, combining Janet’s gossip and impressions of Haworth with her own assessments. ‘Miss Brontë is a nice person,’ she told one friend, ‘Like you … without your merriment.’3 To another, ‘Her hands are like birds’ claws, and she is so short sighted that she cannot see your face unless you are close to her.’4 And to yet another:

She is very little and very plain. Her stunted person she ascribes to the scanty supply of food she had as a growing girl, when at that school of the Daughters of the Clergy … She is truth itself and of a very noble sterling nature, which has never been called out by anything kind or genial.5

Weaving the elements into a story for her friends, Elizabeth set the grim scene:

She is the last of six; lives in a wild out of the way village in the Yorkshire Moors with a wayward eccentric wild father – their parsonage facing the North – no flowers or shrub or tree can grow in the spot of ground, on account of the biting winds.

The house had never been painted or refurnished in thirty years, when Charlotte’s mother died of cancer when she was 5 years old, crying in her bedridden final weeks, ‘Oh God my poor children!’; her father was a ‘strange, half mad’ Irishman prone to violent outbursts. Elizabeth reported:

For instance, once in one of his wife’s confinements something went wrong, so he got a saw, and went and sawed up all the chairs in her bedroom, never answering her remonstrances or minding her tears. Another time he was vexed and took the hearth-rug & tied it in a tight bundle & set it on fire in the grate.6

He was frugal and stern, eating separately from his six motherless children and leaving them to be educated by the servants, destroying their colourful shoes and depriving them of meat to staunch vanity and indulgence. Charlotte and three of her sisters boarded at the charity school where the eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted the tuberculosis that killed them six weeks apart aged 11 and 10 after they were brought home. ‘All this Lady Kay-Shuttleworth told me,’ Elizabeth wrote.

How Janet could share such a comprehensive biography when she and Charlotte barely knew each other is a matter of conjecture. One of her sources was an acquaintance, an old Burnley woman who nursed Charlotte’s mother in her final months. Martha Wright worked for the family through the summer of 1821 and remembered the uncommonly quiet children shepherded by Maria, the eldest – their mother weeping in bed – and heard stories about Patrick’s rages from before her time with the family. Yet in Elizabeth’s retelling of Janet’s account another voice is implicit. She says Charlotte described herself as ‘stunted’ by school and quotes her own account of asking her father for an allowance that he refused, deciding instead to try to escape penury by becoming a governess for wealthy families, indicating Charlotte volunteered the information on her own. As the stories describing her deprivations and defeats finally overcome are more self-justifying than speculative, more self-preserving than the interests of gossips, they indicate origins more intimate than the prurience of Brontë acquaintances, or in any embellishments by Janet. None of the stories has the perspective of Charlotte’s siblings, parents or aunt, or are as objective or inaccurate as they should be had they been invented by acquaintances. Throughout the narratives about a household of two parents, an unmarried aunt, three servants and six children only one subjective perspective remains consistent: Charlotte’s. This presents the possibility that the narrative relayed from Janet to Elizabeth, and then to Elizabeth’s circle of friends was a rhetorical life story originally told by Charlotte herself. A few years later, when she stayed with her at Haworth, Elizabeth noticed how much Charlotte talked about herself and her family:

There are some people whose stock of facts and anecdotes are soon exhausted; but Miss B is none of these. She has the wild, strange facts of her own and her sisters’ lives – and beyond and above these she has the most original and suggestive thoughts of her own; so that like the moors, I felt on the last days as if our talk might be extended in any direction without getting to the end of any subject.7

Harriet Martineau heard similar stories from Charlotte the night they met. To her, Charlotte was elemental, ‘full of life and power’, volunteering ‘her name and the history of her life’ in an intense two-hour dialogue. Charlotte told Harriet – who told Elizabeth, who relayed it to her friends – that her father had ‘never slept out of his house for 26 years; she has lived a most retired life … never been in society, and many other particulars.’8

Insatiably curious about Charlotte’s life and how far it inspired her fiction, the Kay-Shuttleworths prompted her to tell these stories again at Gawthorpe. Once certain of sympathy, she produced set-piece anecdotes about how the comfortless childhood produced an isolated adulthood. They were a form of explanation for her self-perceived shortcomings in status and looks. Her friends, teachers and the staff of her publisher all heard them. This was Charlotte’s courtship with the outer world, her way of drawing people into her influence and keeping them there. These were the stories Janet transmitted to Elizabeth after Charlotte’s visit, and when all three were together again at Briery Close. They would become foundational in the century of Brontë biographies that followed, colouring the family reputation and obscuring historical truth with imperishable elements of myth. Even one of Elizabeth’s recipients commented in appalled fascination:

Poor Miss Brontë, I cannot get the look of the grey, square, cold, dead-coloured house out of my head. One feels as if one ought to go to her at once and do something for her … Her life at least almost makes one like her books, though one does not want there to be any more Miss Brontës.9

At its core, this mythology contains the fugitive pieces of Charlotte’s own autobiography never committed to paper. It was a story of self-justification and self-glorification honed over years, which in 1850 met its most responsive listener: Elizabeth Gaskell. But before the end of the year, Charlotte would expand her self-mythologising further than even she had dared take it before.

In the weeks afterwards, Charlotte reflected on what she had told Janet and Elizabeth about the brief lives and hasty deaths of her siblings. Coming home always drew her into a depression so engulfing it undid the relief any holiday brought. ‘The deadly silence, solitude, desolation were awful,’ she told Ellen, ‘the craving for companionship – the hopelessness of relief – were what I should dread to feel again.’10 Compounding her deflation and loneliness was the approaching anniversary of her brother’s death, into the season when her sisters failed and followed him. ‘I need say no more,’ she told Elizabeth, ‘As to running away from here every time I have a battle of this sort to fight – it would not do.’11

She turned to all she had left of them: their belongings. Handling their pens, used paint boxes and needlework sets, trinkets and small pieces of cheap jewellery only deepened her sense of isolation and in seeking comfort, Charlotte found the opposite. ‘I lost in some days of indisposition the additional flesh and strength I had previously gained,’ she told a friend. ‘This resulted from the painful task of looking over letters and papers belonging to my sisters. Many little mementoes and memoranda conspired to make an impression inexorably sad which solitude deepened and fostered till I grew ill.’12 She expanded with another, ‘My mind had undergone some painful laceration in the course of looking over my sisters’ papers – mementoes and memoranda that would have been nothing to others, conveyed for me so keen a sting.’

Without friends physically nearby and having resolved to protect her father from her grief like a child, she found ‘no means of lightening or effacing the sad impression … Continuous solitude grew more than I could bear.’13 Reading Emily’s and Anne’s poetry manuscripts, she wondered if anything new from them could be published. Both had made their own selections in life, releasing with Charlotte what they saw fit for public consumption, and kept their personal and authorial identities separate. All three contributed to Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, published in the summer of 1846, with Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey issued together in a set in December the following year. Anne published her second and last novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in June 1848, before Poems was reissued the following November. By then, Branwell had died and Emily and Anne had symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill Emily before the end of the year, then Anne the following spring.