Brontë Charlotte - Selected letters of Charlotte Brontë

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

SELECTED LETTERS

CHARLOTTE BRONT was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1816, the third child of Patrick and Maria Bront. Her father was perpetual curate of Haworth, Yorkshire, from 1820 until his death in 1861. Her mother died in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son. All of the girls except Anne were sent to a clergymens daughters boarding school (recalled as Lowood in Jane Eyre). The eldest sisters, Maria (Helen Burns) and Elizabeth, became ill there, were taken home, and died soon after at Haworth. Charlotte was employed as a teacher from 1835 to 1838, was subsequently a governess, and in 1842 went with her sister Emily to study languages in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger. Both sisters returned to Haworth when their aunt died, but Charlotte went back to the Pensionnat as a teacher in 1843. Her low spirits and her loneliness there were exacerbated by Emilys absence and by her powerful and unrequited feelings for Monsieur Heger. She returned to Haworth in the following year, and in 1846 there appeared Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Charlottes first novel, The Professor, was rejected by several publishers, and was not published until 1857. Jane Eyre was published (under the pseudonym Currer Bell) in 1847 and achieved immediate success. In 1848 Branwell Bront died, as did Emily before the end of the same year, and Anne in the following summer, so that Charlotte alone survived of the six children. Shirley was published in 1849, and Villette in 1853, both pseudonymously, although Currer Bell was identified as Charlotte Bront soon after Shirley appeared. In 1854, Charlotte married her fathers curate, the Revd A. B. Nicholls, whose passionate attachment to her won her over despite her fathers objections. She died in March 1855, a few weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday, probably of complications associated with early pregnancy.

MARGARET SMITH is the editor of The Letters of Charlotte Bront (3 vols., 19952004), and co-author with Christine Alexander of The Oxford Companion to the Bronts (2003).

JANET GEZARI is Lucy Marsh Haskell 19 Professor of English at Connecticut College. She is the author of Charlotte Bront and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (1992) and Last Things: Emily Bronts Poems (2007).

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OXFORD WORLD S CLASSICS

CHARLOTTE BRONT

Edited by
MARGARET SMITH

With a new Introduction by
JANET GEZARI

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2010

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I am especially grateful to the Bront Society for their permission to publish transcriptions of many of the manuscript letters in the Bonnell, Grolier, Seton-Gordon, and Bront Society collections, and for the prompt and courteous response of the staff of the Bront Parsonage Museum to my requests.

I acknowledge with thanks the permission of the following libraries to reproduce my transcriptions of manuscripts in their collections: the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for Autograph b.9 no. 264; the British Library for manuscripts in Ashley MSS 161, 164, 172, 2452 and in Additional MSS 38732 and 39763; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to whom rights in this publication are assigned, for six manuscript letters; and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for five manuscript letters in the Harry Elkins Widener Collection, and three letters with the call number MS Eng. 871. I thank Richard Workman and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for their acknowledgement of my notification of intent to quote from or publish manuscripts in the Research Center Collection. I am grateful to Mr Peter Henderson, Walpole Librarian, for permission to publish a letter in the Hugh Walpole Collection at the Kings School, Canterbury. For permission to reproduce letters in their respective collections, I thank David S. Zeidberg, Director, and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Wayne Furman, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Charles E. Pierce, Jr., and The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (MA 2696); Margaret Sherry Rich and Princeton University Library, for letters in the Robert H. Taylor Collection and the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The letter from Charlotte Bront to Elizabeth Gaskell of 27 August 1850 in the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, is published by permission of the Duke of Devonshire. The arrangement of this volume owes much to Alan G. Hills exemplary selected