Read Online The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Catherine Reef
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“He appears a respectable young man,reads well, and I hope will give satisfaction,” Charlotte noted.
When Charlotte said that Nicholls read well, she was referring to the way he read sermons aloud in church. The reading he did for pleasure was a different matter. He preferred dry books on church governance to the kinds of writing the Brontë siblings were producing—fiction and poetry. Branwell, for one, was trying to write a novel. He was blending Angrian legend with his heart’s dearest wish to tell the tale of the fictional Maria Thurston. This beautiful married woman falls in love with Alexander Percy, the hero who had fought Satan in one of Branwell’s early stories. Charlotte had also started a novel, one that she would call
The Professor.
She drew inspiration from her memories of Brussels. And Anne had begun writing
Agnes Grey,
a novel with a governess as its main character, while still employed at Thorp Green.
Emily was writing something, too, but what? “Many’s the timethat I have seen Miss Emily put down the ‘tally-iron’ as she was ironing the clothes to scribble something on a piece of paper,” said Martha Brown, who came to the parsonage as a “help-girl,” to assist the aging Tabby. “Whatever she was doing, ironing or baking, she had her pencil and paper by her.”
One autumn day in 1845, Charlotte happened on a notebook of poems that Emily had written and hidden away. While she was paging through the book, “something more than surprise”took hold of her. Here were verses unlike any she had seen flow from a woman’s pen: “They stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet.” These poems brought to Charlotte’s ear “a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.” When she revealed to her remote, self-willed sister that she had read the secret verses, Emily flew into a rage. It took hours for her to quiet down enough to hear Charlotte say how good the poems were.
The angry storm passed, and quiet Anne stepped forward to invite Charlotte to read a stash of poems that
she
had written. Charlotte acknowledged that this poetry was different from Emily’s but thought that “these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own.”
All three sisters had written poems worthy of being printed in a book—a book that might bring in some money. So on February 6, 1846, a package left Haworth addressed to Aylott and Jones, a small London publishing company. It held the work of three poets with the manly names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Women had been publishing novels, poetry, and nonfiction for a century, but whether women should write was controversial. Some Victorian women courageously produced books under their own names. In 1850, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell would take credit for
Mary Barton,
a novel of lower-class life. Other women hid their sex from the reading public by choosing male pseudonyms. One such woman was Mary Ann Evans, who is known to the world as George Eliot, the author of
Middlemarch
and other realistic novels. Evans wanted readers to judge her as a writer rather than as a woman. She wanted to be free to write about any subject, even if people thought it wrong for a female author. For not only did society tell women what they must not do, it also decided which subjects were off limits to them in books and in life. One of these subjects was passion.
The pen name George Eliot gave Mary Ann Evans freedom to write novels that people thought should come from a man.
Many people agreed with the poet Robert Southey, who had told Charlotte that literature was the business of men. The critic George Henry Lewes asked, “Does it never strikethese delightful creatures that their little fingers were meant to be kissed, not to be inked?” In 1854 Lewes and George Eliot would cause a scandal by living together as an unmarried couple. Yet before then Lewes belittled women writers, wondering, “Are there no stockings to darn, no purses to make, no braces
When Charlotte said that Nicholls read well, she was referring to the way he read sermons aloud in church. The reading he did for pleasure was a different matter. He preferred dry books on church governance to the kinds of writing the Brontë siblings were producing—fiction and poetry. Branwell, for one, was trying to write a novel. He was blending Angrian legend with his heart’s dearest wish to tell the tale of the fictional Maria Thurston. This beautiful married woman falls in love with Alexander Percy, the hero who had fought Satan in one of Branwell’s early stories. Charlotte had also started a novel, one that she would call
The Professor.
She drew inspiration from her memories of Brussels. And Anne had begun writing
Agnes Grey,
a novel with a governess as its main character, while still employed at Thorp Green.
Emily was writing something, too, but what? “Many’s the timethat I have seen Miss Emily put down the ‘tally-iron’ as she was ironing the clothes to scribble something on a piece of paper,” said Martha Brown, who came to the parsonage as a “help-girl,” to assist the aging Tabby. “Whatever she was doing, ironing or baking, she had her pencil and paper by her.”
One autumn day in 1845, Charlotte happened on a notebook of poems that Emily had written and hidden away. While she was paging through the book, “something more than surprise”took hold of her. Here were verses unlike any she had seen flow from a woman’s pen: “They stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet.” These poems brought to Charlotte’s ear “a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.” When she revealed to her remote, self-willed sister that she had read the secret verses, Emily flew into a rage. It took hours for her to quiet down enough to hear Charlotte say how good the poems were.
The angry storm passed, and quiet Anne stepped forward to invite Charlotte to read a stash of poems that
she
had written. Charlotte acknowledged that this poetry was different from Emily’s but thought that “these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own.”
All three sisters had written poems worthy of being printed in a book—a book that might bring in some money. So on February 6, 1846, a package left Haworth addressed to Aylott and Jones, a small London publishing company. It held the work of three poets with the manly names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Women had been publishing novels, poetry, and nonfiction for a century, but whether women should write was controversial. Some Victorian women courageously produced books under their own names. In 1850, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell would take credit for
Mary Barton,
a novel of lower-class life. Other women hid their sex from the reading public by choosing male pseudonyms. One such woman was Mary Ann Evans, who is known to the world as George Eliot, the author of
Middlemarch
and other realistic novels. Evans wanted readers to judge her as a writer rather than as a woman. She wanted to be free to write about any subject, even if people thought it wrong for a female author. For not only did society tell women what they must not do, it also decided which subjects were off limits to them in books and in life. One of these subjects was passion.
The pen name George Eliot gave Mary Ann Evans freedom to write novels that people thought should come from a man.
Many people agreed with the poet Robert Southey, who had told Charlotte that literature was the business of men. The critic George Henry Lewes asked, “Does it never strikethese delightful creatures that their little fingers were meant to be kissed, not to be inked?” In 1854 Lewes and George Eliot would cause a scandal by living together as an unmarried couple. Yet before then Lewes belittled women writers, wondering, “Are there no stockings to darn, no purses to make, no braces
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