Edition 7: What’s in a name?: Anonymity and Women Writers

This week I write about anonymity and women writers. In the 19th century, all books were measured against the Victorian ideals of the time. So, if a woman wrote about sexual passion, alcoholism, domestic abuse, violence, or used slang, she was not only unfeminine but also a dangerous revolutionary - what was all this talk of equality and denunciation of clerics and authority figures as hypocrites? And more importantly, how would she have the worldly knowledge to write about these issues?  When Charlotte Bront?’s Jane cried, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will” in Jane Eyre (1847), it was as incendiary as any statement in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto! 

The Bront? sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne published their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall under the masculine pseudonyms Curer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.  They used pseudonyms as much to ensure privacy and avoid celebrity as to write with complete freedom - without being judged as female, with no reference to their family or biography – in a sense, through their desire for anonymity, they raised questions about how readers of the time viewed women’s authorship and writing.

In 1847, Jane Eyre shocked people. Bloody revolutions had broken out in Italy, Hungary, France and Germany and the story of a poor governess and a mystery-ridden rich master was surely only just a love story? However, a critic in The Quarterly Review warned:

“There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor, which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment — there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.”

This piece is about Charlotte Bront? (1816-1855) as she was the most successful of the Bront?s. Her father was an Irish Anglican clergyman. Her mother died of cancer when Bront? was five, leaving five daughters and a son, Branwell. Four years later, her older two sisters died of tuberculosis. Bront? blamed Clergy Daughters' School where she and her sisters were enrolled, for their deaths, and later for the surviving sisters’ ill-health. She in fact used the school as the basis for depicting Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

Bront? and her surviving siblings, Emily, Anne and Branwell were bound by being family of course, but also by their remote country upbringing, love of their moorland home and their delight in composition – the siblings wrote stories and composed poetry from an early age. Jane Eyre was the first to be published in 1847; Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were published later the same year. Emily and Anne’s books were not received in the same way; nevertheless, after some confusion about the real author of the books (after their mixed reviews and middling sales, their publisher suggested (in order to push sales perhaps!) that these books were from the same author as that of Jane Eyre. Their sister’s undoubted fame made Emily and Anne Bront? immortal as well.

The appearance of three novels in the same year, all apparently penned by a Bell, one of which was hugely praised, gave rise to gossip about the true identity and relationship of the authors. Some said it had to be men (brothers, possibly); some thought it was a couple; the man writing out Mr. Rochester and the wife drawing Jane’s character. Nevertheless, the reception Jane Eyre received was astounding - no one had written novels like this before, with so much unaccountable power. Bront?’s father was told of its authorship after the publication of the novel and its critical success; she revealed her identity to her publisher when she visited him in London to dispel any doubt as to the true authorship of the book. 

Despite receiving praise from the influential critic George Henry Lewes and celebrated author William Makepeace Thackeray who was writing Vanity Fair at the same time, criticism of Jane Eyre was still appearing even two years after its publication. Bront? was very defensive about it. A review in the North British Review in 1849 insinuated that the “Bells” were one and the same. It went on to say if a woman, Curer Bell, “must be a woman pretty nearly unsexed.” Bront? was very upset by the hypocrisy and misogyny of it; her entire objective of writing under a pseudonym had failed to achieve the purpose of not judging the novel by its author! She is said to have written: “To such critics, I would say—‘to you I am neither Man nor Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.”

Between September 1848 and May 1849, Bront? would lose all three siblings, all due to tuberculosis, and in Branwell’s case, aggravated by alcoholism and opium addiction. It made her more of a recluse, fierce in the defense of her anonymity and angry at the criticism of the Bront?/Bell books, particularly that directed at Emily and Anne. Shirley was published in 1849 – the reviews of the book left her very vulnerable. Readers were still speculating about the gender of Curer Bell and the most scathing criticism came from George Lewes whose review described the book as coarse and female creativity as inferior, concluding that “the grand function of woman . . . is, and ever must be, Maternity.” Bront? wrote to him to say, “I can be on my guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”. For sure, Shirley had some pretty strong lines, especially on female powerlessness:

“Ask no questions; utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrised . . . You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learnt the great lesson how to endure without a sob.”

Elizabeth Gaskell was one of the very few to praise Shirley. And it is in this way Bront?’s identity as a woman was revealed – she was eager to get to know Gaskell that led her to strike a friendship with her. Gaskell fed her craving for intelligent discussion and a sympathetic audience and spurred Bront? to write a biographical preface to a new edition where she wrote about sisters and her upbringing. Perhaps the adverse criticism and fading interest in her sisters’ books and her growing fame and the large cheques from her publishers (￡500 for the copyright of Shirley) may have been another reason. 

Bront? understood keenly the importance of money, particularly for married women. Bront? wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey about spousal inequality: “Who holds the purse will wish to be Master, Ellen; depend on it whether Man or Woman — who provides the cash will now and then value himself (or herself) upon it — and even in the case of ordinary Minds, reproach the less wealthy partner.” I read recently that average annual income in Britain at the time was thirty pounds, a typical salary for a governess like Jane. If you had five hundred pounds a year, as Bront? did from the first edition of Shirley, you could live comfortably. Hence, I would surmise that for her, her pseudonym and the speculation around her gender afforded an income and fame from writing unavailable to other women of her time.

In 1854, she married Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died during pregnancy the very next year at the age of thirty-eight. Gaskell published her Life of Charlotte Bront? soon after and all anonymity and privacy came to an end. Ironically, Life of Charlotte Bront? rivalled even Jane Eyre in sales and notoriety.