The Bronte Sisters (14 page)

Agnes likes life somewhat better with the second family to employ her, the Murrays of Horton Lodge. Her new pupils include two teenage girls, Rosalie and Matilda. Rosalie is sixteen and pretty, but she thinks only of the impression she makes and the hearts she can conquer. Fourteen-year-old Matilda is a big, active girl who uses rough language and feels most at home in the stable. Mrs. Murray orders the governess to “oblige, instruct, refine,
and polish” these girls, or, as Agnes observes, to “render them as superficially attractive and showily accomplished as they could possibly be made.” Securing wealthy husbands is to be their great aim in life.

After her father’s death, Agnes returns home to help her mother run a school. She feels some regret at leaving Rosalie, who has grown close to her, and a new curate, Edward Weston, of whom she is fond. A year later, Agnes returns to the neighborhood of Horton Lodge to visit Rosalie, who is married to the wealthy Sir Thomas Ashby. Rosalie has done what was expected of her. She has a grand home and a baby, but she detests her husband and her life with him. “And as for all the wisdom
and goodness you have been trying to instil into me—that is all very right and proper I dare say, and if I were some twenty years older, I might fructify by it,” she admits to Agnes Grey. “But people must enjoy themselves when they are young!”

Agnes tells her readers, “Of course, I pitied her
exceedingly, as well for her false idea of happiness and disregard of duty, as for the wretched partner with whom her fate was linked.” In contrast to Rosalie, Agnes earns the love of pious Mr. Weston and the happiness she deserves through virtue and bending of inclination to duty.

The publisher of these two novels, T. C. Newby, turned out to care only about making a quick profit. Thanks to sloppy editing, his editions of
Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes Grey
contained many punctuation errors and misspellings. Even Agnes Grey’s name appeared as “Anges” on several pages. Much later it would come to light that he lied to the sisters about how many books he had printed and sold so he could cheat them out of money they had earned. In 1854, Charlotte, as the last surviving sister, would receive ninety pounds that should have been paid to Emily and Anne.

While Charlotte, Emily, and Anne continued writing, they also did the duties expected of a minister’s unmarried daughters. One of these was to sit and visit with ladies who called at the parsonage. One day, they spent two hours listening to a woman named Mrs. Collins, who told a tale of triumph over woe.

Six years earlier, this good woman had lived with her husband in Keighley. Mr. Collins had been a curate, a man of the cloth, but in his drunkenness he used to beat his wife and children. His reckless spending plunged the couple into debt, and finally his bad habits led to his dismissal. Mr. Collins abandoned his ailing wife and their offspring in Manchester and took off for places unknown. Slowly, Mrs. Collins worked to restore her health and reputation. When she called in Haworth she could boast that she was an independent woman who ran a lodging house in Manchester, and that she had saved her children from their father’s violence and bad example.

Anne soaked up every word.

T
HE
public’s great interest in
Jane Eyre
brought invitations through her publisher to venture into society, but Charlotte turned them down. In February 1848, a London theater company presented a play based on her novel, but she declined to see it. Stepping out meant telling the world that Currer Bell was really Charlotte Brontë of Haworth. Charlotte preferred to keep her secret, to stay home and write with her sisters. In the evening, after their father had retired to his bedchamber, they read aloud to one another from their work in progress.

While Charlotte searched her imagination for the story of her next book, Anne finished a second novel,
The Ten
ant of Wildfell Hall.
Anne stubbornly had it published by T. C. Newby, despite his slipshod handling of
Agnes Grey,
but she soon regretted her decision. Hoping to make a big profit on an American edition, the shady publisher told a U.S. firm that Anne’s new book was written by the author of the best-selling
Jane Eyre.
In other words, Currer and Acton Bell were really the same person. Word got around, and soon Charlotte received a perplexed letter from George Smith of Smith, Elder and Company. He demanded an explanation, and he deserved one, because Currer Bell’s next novel had been promised to him.

The sisters knew that the time had come to reveal their separate identities—at least to their publishers. So in July 1848, Charlotte and Anne packed a small box. One day after tea, they walked four miles through a thunderstorm to Keighley, where they boarded a train to the West Yorkshire city of Leeds. There they caught an overnight train to London. Emily, the most private and homebound of the three, had flatly refused to go.

Anne and Charlotte reached the great city at eight in the morning and went to their lodging, the Chapter Coffee House. It was an old, paneled place where gentlemen stayed. It was thought unsuitable for ladies on their own, but the Brontë sisters came from the country and knew no better. They washed up, had breakfast, and set out on their errand.

That morning, George Smith was hard at work at his desk, with a busy day ahead of him. He was less than pleased to hear that two ladies had come to see him, and that they declined to give their names. Smith had them shown into his office and vowed to deal quickly with this irksome interruption. He looked up to see two “rather quaintly dressed
little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking.” The smaller one handed him a letter that he had written to Currer Bell.

Smith glanced at the letter in his hand, and then at the woman. He looked again at the letter, and back at the woman. Several moments passed before he understood that he was meeting the author of
Jane Eyre.
His morning’s work forgotten, he introduced the Misses Brontë to his colleague William Smith Williams, a gentle older man. His earlier annoyance transformed into joy, George Smith suddenly wanted the Brontës to see London’s sights and its people. He urged them to view the latest art exhibition. He talked excitedly of presenting them to his mother and sisters, and to Thackeray and Lewes.

No, Charlotte said, although she would have loved to meet these literary stars. She and Anne were telling their secret to their publishers alone. The rest of the world must go on thinking of the Bells as three gentlemen, she insisted. But wouldn’t they at least attend a party while pretending to be his “country cousins,”
Smith asked. Charlotte saw that “he would have liked some excitement,”
but again she said no.

That evening, Smith called for Charlotte and Anne at their hotel. He was with his two sisters and William Smith Williams, and all were elegantly dressed. They were on their way to the opera and insisted the Brontës come along. Charlotte’s head ached, and she and Anne had nothing fancy to wear, but they put on their best country dresses and went anyway. “Fine ladies and gentlemen
glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances—still I felt pleasurably excited,” Charlotte reported to Mary Taylor, “and I saw Anne was calm and gentle which she always is.”

Charlotte Brontë and George Smith later wrote down their impressions of each other. In a letter to Mary Taylor, Charlotte summed up Smith as “a firm, intelligent man
of business though so young.” He was “bent on getting on—and I think desirous to make his way by fair, honourable means.” Smith was “enterprising—but likewise cool & cautious.” And, finally, “Mr. Smith is a practical man.”

Long after Charlotte Brontë’s death, George Smith confessed that he thought she looked “interesting rather than attractive.
She was very small, and had a quaint old-fashioned look. Her head seemed too large for her body. She had fine eyes, but her face was marred by the shape of the mouth.” Charlotte displayed very little “feminine charm,” and, Smith perceived, “of this fact she herself was uneasily and perpetually conscious. It may seem strange that the possession of genius did not lift her above the weakness of an excessive anxiety about her personal appearance. But I believe she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful.”

Anne Brontë, wrote Smith, “was a gentle, quiet, rather subdued person, by no means pretty, yet of a pleasing appearance. Her manner was curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.” Anne proved that appearances can deceive, because her new book was not only frank, but downright shocking.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
begins in the village of Linden-Car, where everyone seems curious about Helen Graham, the woman who has come to live in the old stone mansion called Wildfell Hall. Helen is the mother of a five-year-old boy, and apparently she is a widow, but she remains aloof from village society. Her dark beauty entrances a young farmer named Gilbert Markham, yet Helen resists growing close to him. When Gilbert presses her to know why, she gives him her diary to read. This diary reveals Helen’s secret—that her real name is Helen Huntingdon, and her husband lives.