By 1845, it seemed that all of the Brontes' hopes and plans
had come to nothing. Branwell was an idle drunk, whose periodic
rampages disrupted the peace of the house. Charlotte and
Emily's school never got past the planning stage, and all three
sisters were at home again. Only then, as a last resort, did
the Bronte women begin to think seriously about writing for
publication. Jane Eyre was actually Charlotte's second novel
(her first, The Professor, wasn't published till years later),
but it came out before either of her sisters' books and paved
the way for their success. Some critics have a hard time
understanding how Charlotte, many of whose childhood Angria
stories are quite awful, could have developed into the mature
writer who produced Jane Eyre. However, in one way there is a
direct connection between those private childhood fantasies and
Jane Eyre: Unlike most writers of her time, Charlotte didn't
claim to be presenting an objective view of society. And she
could identify with people who were the outsiders in Victorian
society--children, poor relatives, powerless employees of rich
families, women in love with men who did not--or could not--love
them in return. Today it's quite common for a novel to be
intensely personal. In 1847, when Jane Eyre appeared, it was a
daring departure, perhaps more daring than even Charlotte
realized.
Charlotte's naivete about literary society is shown by an
incident that occurred shortly after Jane Eyre was published.
William Thackeray, a successful and socially prominent novelist,
wrote Charlotte a letter praising her book, and in gratitude she
dedicated the second edition to him. Charlotte may have been
the only literary person in England who didn't know that
Thackeray, like Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, had a wife who was
insane. To make matters worse, Thackeray had just published a
novel about a scheming governess who tries to seduce her
employer. Gossips put two and two together and decided that the
author of Jane Eyre had been having an affair with Thackeray!
As this incident shows, women novelists in the 19th century
were expected to be personalities--either romantic adventuresses
or eccentrics. Charlotte confounded everyone by being neither.
She impressed the people who met her as being small,
ordinary-looking, and rather shy. Nor, despite the passionate
pleas for women's independence in her books, was she much
interested in becoming a feminist crusader. All she did, or
wanted to do, was to write good books. Instead of giving up in
disappointment, some of her admirers became all the more curious
and continued to pick through Charlotte's novels in search of
clues to hidden mysteries in her past.
In 1854, Charlotte did the one thing that could have
surprised her intimate friends and her public alike--she got
