The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë, page 26
“Branwell! Branwell! Wake up! Wake up!” I shouted, shaking him, but he only murmured in his sleep and turned, oblivious.
“Get more water!” cried Emily. Anne raced out. While Emily dragged Branwell out of bed and flung him unceremoniously into the corner (where he awoke and shrank back against the wall, screaming in terror and confusion), I heaved the flaming bedclothes into the centre of the room and began beating them with a blanket. Emily seized my brother’s coat from a chair and attacked the flames which enveloped the curtains. Anne and Martha both returned with cans of water from the kitchen; they joined the battle against the inferno, and at last we succeeded in extinguishing it. The hiss of the quenched elements surrounded us as we all stood in the small chamber, choking and waving away the vapour. I opened the window. Branwell continued to scream in the corner like an idiot.
“You stupid fool!” exclaimed Emily, whirling on him. “You know better than to go to sleep with a candle burning! You could have burnt the house down!”
It took all the rest of the afternoon and evening to clean up the mess, and some months before we managed to replace the damaged covers and curtains on the bed. From that day forward, Branwell was forbidden to have a light when left alone, and we hid all the candles, changing their storage place with regularity so that he could never find them. Furthermore, papa—who had always been deeply concerned about the dangers of fire—insisted that Branwell sleep in his room in future, so that he could prevent him from coming to further harm. The two men shared a bed every night thenceforth, for the remainder of Branwell’s life.
As I wrote, a year sped by. During this time, the forlorn little parcel with our three other manuscripts made its rounds to a succession of publishers, meeting with rejection after rejection. Emily seemed to lose heart at this lack of interest in our work, but Anne did not; she began a new book of her own. As before, we met every evening to share what we were working on.
One night in midwinter 1847, when I had read aloud the latest chapter of my half-completed manuscript, Emily said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, “It is very good, Charlotte. I believe this is the best thing you have ever written. The mystery is so compelling, I can barely wait to hear the next chapter.”
“I love it, too,” said Anne quietly. “Jane is so real; my heart goes out to her. I do worry a bit, though, about the way you portray religion in the novel. Sometimes it seems as if you wish to do away with morality.”
“I take no stand on morality here. It is only a story.”
“But in making Mr. Rochester your hero,” persisted Anne, “you seem to be glorifying certain very base qualities. He is a very domineering man, with so many past mistresses, and he has an illegitimate child.”
“Do not be such a prig, Anne,” countered Emily. “I adore Mr. Rochester. Can you not see that he is, in every way, the embodiment of Charlotte’s beloved Duke of Zamorna? It is those same base qualities that made the Duke so vital and interesting before, and they are no less fascinating to read about to-day.” To me, she added, “I am amused, however, that you chose to make Mr. Rochester small, dark, irascible, and far from handsome. This, and his penchant for cigar-smoking, bears a greater resemblance to Monsieur Héger than your Duke.”
I blushed at this observation. “I suppose I did model Mr. Rochester’s physical likeness a bit after Monsieur Héger.”
All the stories I had written in my youth contributed, in some way, to my new effort, and my sisters recognised each and every reference with enthusiasm.
When I revealed the truth about Bertha Mason, Anne cried, “It reminds me of The Fairy Gift—but it is so much more thrilling!” I had quite forgotten that tale, which I had written at age thirteen, about a hero who was given four wishes. Although he wished to marry a beauty, he was given instead a horribly ugly and villainously strong wife, who haunted the corridors and stairways of a great mansion and tried to strangle him.
When I read the scene where Mr. Rochester tests Jane’s love in the garden, Emily said, “That was very well done. The way he tortures her, step by step, before finally revealing his love—it is just like the Duke of Zamorna’s jealous trial of Mina Laury, as well as that other story you wrote—where Sir William Percy begs Elizabeth Hastings to be his mistress.”55
“Yes,” agreed I, “and Anne, as always, should be pleased with the outcome—since Jane, like Elizabeth Hastings, takes the moral line and flees from temptation.”
I completed Jane Eyre in early summer 1847, and had begun to make a fair-copy, but was obliged to put my work aside when Ellen came to visit us for a few weeks. My sisters and I always looked forward to Ellen’s visits. In the sixteen years since Ellen and I first met at school, a warm affection had developed between her and Emily and Anne, and she was now considered almost as one of the family.
“I see no reason why I cannot tell Nell about the book,” I said to Emily before Ellen arrived. “It would be easier on all of us if we could continue our work in the evenings, while Nell is here.”
“No,” insisted Emily. “I do not want her, or any one, to know about our writing. Our books have been rejected by every publisher to whom you sent them, and our book of poetry did so poorly—it is too humiliating!”
“We will sell our novels,” I told Emily, despite the growing doubt that gnawed at me with each new rejection. “We have only to persevere and be patient.”
Papa had long since regained his health and eyesight in such full measure, that he had been able to resume all his usual duties in the parish. Mr. Nicholls, who had carried papa’s entire burden for so long in duty, if not in title, was again relegated to his lesser role as curate. To his credit, Mr. Nicholls accepted this demotion with humility and grace, professing his continued delight and relief in my father’s recovery. Every day, however, we expected Mr. Nicholls to accept a new post elsewhere, where he might take charge of his own parish—a promotion which, despite my own personal misgivings about him, I had to admit he certainly deserved. To my surprise, this never happened.
“I know why Mr. Nicholls does not leave,” said Ellen during her visit in early July.
My sisters, Ellen, and I were relaxing lazily at one of our favourite spots, far out on the purple-tinged heath, hidden in an embankment along Sladen Beck, a place we called “The Meeting of the Waters.” This secluded oasis of emerald green turf was dotted with small, clear springs that converged together in the stream, and at this season, it was festooned with clusters of brilliantly-coloured flowers. Since childhood, we had spent countless summer days dallying in this idyllic paradise, removed from all the world, basking in the pure joy of friendship, beneath a glorious canopy of cloudless blue.
All four of us were now seated or reclining, bonnetless, on one of the large, smooth grey rocks that lay scattered here and there within and beside the ponds, as if tossed by some giant hand; our skirts were hiked up indecorously to our knees, and our bare feet dangled in the sparkling, cold water.
“I caught a glimpse of Mr. Nicholls in the hall at the parsonage this morning, when he came to see your father,” Ellen went on. “I think he stays in Haworth, despite the lack of advancement to his career, because he likes you, Charlotte.”
“That is absurd,” said I.
“It is not,” replied Ellen.
“I tell Charlotte this all the time,” said Anne, splashing her feet happily in the water, “but she will not listen.”
“Did you see the way he looked at you, when he entered the house?” asked Ellen.
“I did not.”
“He had the same expression on his countenance that I used to see on Mr. Vincent’s, when he came to court me: awkward shyness and concealed admiration, all mingled with reserve and fear. He was hoping for a word or a look from you; yet you did not even glance his way.”
I thought Ellen must be dreaming, and told her so.
“I did notice him lingering in the passage, eyeing you covertly,” interjected Emily, who was lying, stomach down, on a large rock, sweeping her hand through the clear, shallow water and making the tadpoles dart about.
“Mr. Nicholls is always pleasant to me,” observed Ellen. “He has been good to your father, and such a big help in the parish. Why do you dislike him so?”
I glanced briefly at my sisters, who caught my eye but remained silent. I had never told Ellen the story about Bridget Malone, believing it would be wrong to spread malicious gossip which could prove detrimental to Mr. Nicholls’s career; neither had I told her about the mean-spirited comment Mr. Nicholls had made behind my back when he first came to Haworth, some two years before.
“I am afraid Mr. Nicholls is not the vision of perfection that you imagine him to be, Nell,” said I, as I lay back on the rock and tilted my face up to revel in the warmth of the sun. “It would be indiscreet of me to say why; but not every one in Haworth loves him as well as you do.”
A week later, Ellen had a chance to witness an example of Mr. Nicholls’s unpopular behaviour first-hand. Ever since Mr. Nicholls’s arrival in Haworth, he had been speaking out against the washerwomen’s weekly practice of drying their wet laundry over the table-shaped tombstones in the Haworth churchyard. He was still complaining about it two years later.
“A churchyard should be a revered place of solitude and respect, in remembrance of the deceased,” I had heard Mr. Nicholls say to papa a few months earlier, when I served their tea. “This spectacle is a mockery, akin to holding a weekly picnic on holy ground.”
“I think it rather charming,” I had interjected. “All the women gathered out in the churchyard with their baskets of laundry, chatting away gaily in the breeze. It puts the graveyard to practical use, and makes it seem less gloomy. It is a place for them all to meet once a week.”
“It gets them out of their back-yards,” agreed papa. “I am told they look forward to it.”
“Well, I mean to put an end to it,” Mr. Nicholls had said.
And so he did. He waged a long battle with the trustees of the church, and at length achieved his aim. At services one Sunday in July, Mr. Nicholls made a startling announcement:
“From this day forth, the hanging of laundry shall no longer be allowed in the Haworth churchyard. Ladies, you shall please find a more suitable and respectable place to dry your wet garments.”
A wave of protest rose up amongst the congregants, male and female alike. Mr. Nicholls left the podium amidst boos and catcalls. After the service, people huddled in groups in the churchyard and lane, loudly voicing their complaints. My sisters and Ellen and I were about to head back to the house, when Sylvia Malone strode up with a fierce expression on her face.
“Oh! That Mr. Nicholls!” Sylvia cried. “I’d sure and for certain loathe the sight of him to-day, if I didn’t do so already!”
“I understand Mr. Nicholls’s point about the laundry,” said Anne. “The practice has always seemed disrespectful to me.”
“You would never see laundry hung out to dry in the Birstall churchyard,” agreed Ellen.
“Do you have trees in Birstall?” asked Sylvia.
“We do,” replied Ellen.
“Well, there’s barely a tree to speak of in this township,” said Sylvia heatedly, “so we can’t very well put up a laundry line, can we? Where are we supposed to dry our wet clothes now, I ask you? Oh! How I wish that Mr. Nicholls would go back to Ireland where he belongs, and never return!”
Many parishioners echoed this view, expressing a desire, when Mr. Nicholls left on his annual, month-long holiday to Ireland, that he should not trouble himself to re-cross the Channel.
“This is not a feeling that ought to exist between shepherd and flock,” I told Anne with a disgruntled sigh, after Mr. Nicholls’s departure.
“It will all blow over in time,” replied Anne with quiet assurance.
Anne’s words proved true. The women of the community soon took to hanging their laundry over their own stone walls, or over the wall along Church Lane, which provided an equally fine meeting place.
That same summer, good news at long last occurred on the publishing front. Thomas Newby, the head of a small London firm, expressed a desire to publish Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights together as a three-volume set—Wuthering Heights being a work of such length, they said, that it required two volumes of its own. To my disappointment, no interest was expressed in my novel The Professor, which was declared “deficient in startling incident and thrilling excitement.”
My sisters were beside themselves with joy. I was delighted for them, but at the same time cautious; for the offer came only on condition that the authors paid for publication themselves, by advancing the sum of £50. We had already suffered a most disappointing experience with a self-funded publication, and I worried that no more good would come of this venture, particularly since only 350 copies were to be printed, at a fee that would nearly impoverish my sisters. After so many rejections, however, Emily and Anne were so relieved to have an offer of any kind, that they immediately complied.
This singling out of The Professor for rejection was a real blow. I was about to shove the cherished but dejected manuscript into my bottom drawer, when I recalled that there was one last publishing house on my list, to whom I had not yet applied: the firm of Smith, Elder & Co, of Cornhill, London. Although I knew my work had little hope of being accepted on its own, being too short for publication at one volume, I decided to send it to them anyway. I blush to admit it now, but in my naivete—(paper being so expensive—and having nothing else readily at hand)—I wrapped the manuscript in the same paper in which our works had previously been submitted and returned, simply scoring out the addresses of the other publishers, and adding the new.
I then went back to steadfastly copying out Jane Eyre. In due course, I received a reply from Smith, Elder & Co. I opened the envelope in dreary anticipation of finding two hard, hopeless lines, thanking me for my submission, and intimating that said publishers were not disposed to publish my manuscript. Instead, to my surprise, I took out a letter of two pages.
The letter was from a Mr. William Smith Williams, the literary advisor at Smith, Elder & Co. Mr. Williams declined, indeed, to publish The Professor for “business reasons,” although he insisted that it had “great literary power.” He then went on to discuss its merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered me better than a vulgarly expressed acceptance would have done. He added that a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention.
I re-read the letter four times, my fingers trembling.
In great excitement, I wrote back to Smith & Elder to explain that I had a brand-new “work in three volumes” very nearly ready for submission, in which I had endeavoured to impart a more vivid interest than belonged to the previous one.
I wrote like the wind. At the end of August, I sent off the completed manuscript of Jane Eyre to Cornhill—and sat back to wait for their reply. I did not have long to wait; although at the time, those two weeks seemed the longest of my life.
Every day, I watched like a hawk from the dining-room window for the arrival of the postman. Since Tabby was now too deaf and lame to carry out more than the most simple kitchen tasks, it remained one of her few and most precious delights in life to accept and sort our mail; I would not take that pleasure from her; so I stood, with bated breath, listening as her halting steps sounded from the front door to papa’s study, hoping against hope that she would turn back into the dining-room, and bring me a missive of my own.
When at last it came—when Tabby placed the envelope into my hands, from Smith & Elder to “Mr. Currer Bell, under cover to Miss Brontë, Haworth”—my heart nearly stopped.
“What be the matter, Miss?” cried Tabby in alarm. “Who’s ’at letter from? Why, ye be as white as a ghost!”
“It is nothing,” I said quickly (but loudly, so that she might hear.) Tabby’s eyesight had grown so poor, that it was all she could do to make out the name of a letter’s recipient, much less attempt to decipher the identity of its sender. “It is just an answer to an inquiry I made. I will read it upstairs.” I then darted up to my room, where I ripped open the envelope, and with throbbing pulse, I rapidly took in the words written therein:
My Dear Sir: We are in receipt of your excellent manuscript, Jane Eyre, and would like to extend an offer for the copy and publication rights, in remuneration for which we are prepared to offer you the sum of £100…
I let out a shriek of excitement. Oh! It was too good to be true!
With sudden force, my door flew open and Emily rushed in. “What is wrong? What has happened?” With one look—the letter in my hand, the happiness written all over my face—Emily deduced at once what the missive must contain. “Do they want your book?”
“They will pay to publish! One hundred pounds!”
Emily—normally so staid, so placid, so matter-of-fact, when confronted by any situation in life, be it crisis or celebration—let out a scream, and threw her arms around me. An instant later, Anne blew in, eyes wide with fright, an expression which changed to jubilation when she heard the news. “Charlotte! This is too wonderful!”
“One hundred pounds!” exclaimed Emily.
“To earn something of my own—it is everything I hoped for—and look!” I cried, showing them the letter. “They want the first right of refusal for my next two books, for which I am to receive another one hundred pounds each.”56
We cried out with such glee, that Martha poked her head in with concern, and even Branwell stumbled out of his room in a confused daze, wondering if something in the house had caught fire again. We were forced to grab our bonnets and race out onto the moors, where for several hours we behaved like silly school-girls, running and jumping up and down and hugging each other and emitting such great shrieks of laughter, that any one who saw us must have thought we had gone mad.
“Just think of it!” I exclaimed, throwing my arms wide, and gazing up with delight into the limitless expanse of blue heaven, “after all our hard work, after all the slaving and all the dreaming, we are all to be published at last, at the very same time!”
