TWO SHORT PIECES BY CHARLOTTE BRONTË

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE
OF
ELLIS AND ACTON BELL

It has been thought that all the
works published under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
were, in reality, the production of one person.  This
mistake I endeavoured to rectify by a few words of disclaimer
prefixed to the third edition of ‘Jane Eyre.’ 
These, too, it appears, failed to gain general credence, and now,
on the occasion of a reprint of ‘Wuthering Heights’
and ‘Agnes Grey,’ I am advised distinctly to state
how the case really stands.

Indeed, I feel myself that it is time the obscurity attending
those two names—Ellis and Acton—was done away. 
The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless
pleasure, has lost its interest; circumstances are changed. 
It becomes, then, my duty to explain briefly the origin and
authorship of the books written by Currer, Ellis, and Acton
Bell.

About five years ago, my two sisters and myself, after a
somewhat prolonged period of separation, found ourselves
reunited, and at home.  Resident in a remote district, where
education had made little progress, and where, consequently,
there was no inducement to seek social intercourse beyond our own
domestic circle, we were wholly dependent on ourselves and each
other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of
life.  The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest
pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at
literary composition; formerly we used to show each other what we
wrote, but of late years this habit of communication and
consultation had been discontinued; hence it ensued, that we were
mutually ignorant of the progress we might respectively have
made.

One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a
MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. 
Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did
write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise
seized me—a deep conviction that these were not common
effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally
write.  I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and
genuine.  To my ear they had also a peculiar
music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.

My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character,
nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those
nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude
unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had
made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited
publication.  I knew, however, that a mind like hers could
not be without some latent spark of honourable ambition, and
refused to be discouraged in my attempts to fan that spark to
flame.

Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own
compositions, intimating that, since Emily’s had given me
pleasure, I might like to look at hers.  I could not but be
a partial judge, yet I thought that these verses, too, had a
sweet, sincere pathos of their own.

We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming
authors.  This dream, never relinquished even when distance
divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired
strength and consistency: it took the character of a
resolve.  We agreed to arrange a small selection of our
poems, and, if possible, to get them printed.  Averse to
personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being
dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian
names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare
ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting
that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called
‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that
authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had
noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the
weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is
not true praise.

The bringing out of our little book was hard work.  As
was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted;
but for this we had been prepared at the outset; though
inexperienced ourselves, we had read the experience of
others.  The great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting
answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied. 
Being greatly harassed by this obstacle, I ventured to apply to
the Messrs. Chambers, of Edinburgh, for a word of advice;
they may have forgotten the circumstance, but I
have not, for from them I received a brief and business-like, but
civil and sensible reply, on which we acted, and at last made a
way.

The book was printed: it is scarcely known, and all of it that
merits to be known are the poems of Ellis Bell.  The fixed
conviction I held, and hold, of the worth of these poems has not
indeed received the confirmation of much favourable criticism;
but I must retain it notwithstanding.

Ill-success failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had
given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued.  We
each set to work on a prose tale: Ellis Bell produced
‘Wuthering Heights,’ Acton Bell ‘Agnes
Grey,’ and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative in one
volume.  These MSS. were perseveringly obtruded upon various
publishers for the space of a year and a half; usually, their
fate was an ignominious and abrupt dismissal.

At last ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes
Grey’ were accepted on terms somewhat impoverishing to the
two authors; Currer Bell’s book found acceptance nowhere,
nor any acknowledgment of merit, so that something like the chill
of despair began to invade her heart.  As a forlorn hope,
she tried one publishing house more—Messrs. Smith, Elder
and Co.  Ere long, in a much shorter space than that on
which experience had taught her to calculate—there came a
letter, which she opened in the dreary expectation of finding two
hard, hopeless lines, intimating that Messrs.  Smith, Elder
and Co. ‘were not disposed to publish the MS.,’ and,
instead, she took out of the envelope a letter of two
pages.  She read it trembling.  It declined, indeed, to
publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its
merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit
so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very
refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly expressed
acceptance would have done.  It was added, that a work in
three volumes would meet with careful attention.

I was then just completing ‘Jane Eyre,’ at which I
had been working while the one-volume tale was plodding its weary
round in London: in three weeks I sent it off; friendly and
skilful hands took it in.  This was in the commencement of
September, 1847; it came out before the close of October
following, while ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes
Grey,’ my sisters’ works, which had already been in
the press for months, still lingered under a different
management.

They appeared at last.  Critics failed to do them
justice.  The immature but very real powers revealed in
‘Wuthering Heights’ were scarcely recognised; its
import and nature were misunderstood; the identity of its author
was misrepresented; it was said that this was an earlier and
ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced ‘Jane
Eyre.’  Unjust and grievous error!  We laughed at
it at first, but I deeply lament it now.  Hence, I fear,
arose a prejudice against the book.  That writer who could
attempt to palm off an inferior and immature production under
cover of one successful effort, must indeed be unduly eager after
the secondary and sordid result of authorship, and pitiably
indifferent to its true and honourable meed.  If reviewers
and the public truly believed this, no wonder that they looked
darkly on the cheat.

Yet I must not be understood to make these things subject for
reproach or complaint; I dare not do so; respect for my
sister’s memory forbids me.  By her any such querulous
manifestation would have been regarded as an unworthy and
offensive weakness.

It is my duty, as well as my pleasure, to acknowledge one
exception to the general rule of criticism.  One writer,
endowed with the keen vision and fine sympathies of genius, has
discerned the real nature of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ and
has, with equal accuracy, noted its beauties and touched on its
faults.  Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of
Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the
‘writing on the wall,’ and unable to read the
characters or make known the interpretation.  We have a
right to rejoice when a true seer comes at last, some man in whom
is an excellent spirit, to whom have been given light, wisdom,
and understanding; who can accurately read the ‘Mene, Mene,
Tekel, Upharsin’ of an original mind (however unripe,
however inefficiently cultured and partially expanded that mind
may be); and who can say with confidence, ‘This is the
interpretation thereof.

Yet even the writer to whom I allude shares the mistake about
the authorship, and does me the injustice to suppose that there
was equivoque in my former rejection of this honour (as an honour
I regard it).  May I assure him that I would scorn in this
and in every other case to deal in equivoque; I believe language
to have been given us to make our meaning clear, and not to wrap
it in dishonest doubt?

‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,’ by Acton Bell, had
likewise an unfavourable reception.  At this I cannot
wonder.  The choice of subject was an entire mistake. 
Nothing less congruous with the writer’s nature could be
conceived.  The motives which dictated this choice were
pure, but, I think, slightly morbid.  She had, in the course
of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand, and for
a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and
faculties abused: hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and
dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it
did her harm.  She brooded over it till she believed it to
be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course with fictitious
characters, incidents, and situations), as a warning to
others.  She hated her work, but would pursue it.  When
reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such reasonings as a
temptation to self-indulgence.  She must be honest; she must
not varnish, soften, nor conceal.  This well-meant
resolution brought on her misconstruction, and some abuse, which
she bore, as it was her custom to bear whatever was unpleasant,
with mild, steady patience.  She was a very sincere, and
practical Christian, but the tinge of religious melancholy
communicated a sad shade to her brief, blameless life.

Neither Ellis nor Acton allowed herself for one moment to sink
under want of encouragement; energy nerved the one, and endurance
upheld the other.  They were both prepared to try again; I
would fain think that hope and the sense of power were yet strong
within them.  But a great change approached; affliction came
in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to look back on,
grief.  In the very heat and burden of the day, the
labourers failed over their work.

My sister Emily first declined.  The details of her
illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them,
either in thought or narrative, is not in my power.  Never
in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before
her, and she did not linger now.  She sank rapidly. 
She made haste to leave us.  Yet, while physically she
perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known
her.  Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met
suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and
love.  I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have
never seen her parallel in anything.  Stronger than a man,
simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.  The awful
point was, that while full of ruth for others, on herself she had
no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the
trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same
service was exacted as they had rendered in health.  To
stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a
pain no words can render.

Two cruel months of hope and fear passed painfully by, and the
day came at last when the terrors and pains of death were to be
undergone by this treasure, which had grown dearer and dearer to
our hearts as it wasted before our eyes.  Towards the
decline of that day, we had nothing of Emily but her mortal
remains as consumption left them.  She died December 19,
1848.

We thought this enough: but we were utterly and presumptuously
wrong.  She was not buried ere Anne fell ill.  She had
not been committed to the grave a fortnight, before we received
distinct intimation that it was necessary to prepare our minds to
see the younger sister go after the elder.  Accordingly, she
followed in the same path with slower step, and with a patience
that equalled the other’s fortitude.  I have said that
she was religious, and it was by leaning on those Christian
doctrines in which she firmly believed, that she found support
through her most painful journey.  I witnessed their
efficacy in her latest hour and greatest trial, and must bear my
testimony to the calm triumph with which they brought her
through.  She died May 28, 1849.

What more shall I say about them?  I cannot and need not
say much more.  In externals, they were two unobtrusive
women; a perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and
habits.  In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and
simplicity seemed to meet.  Under an unsophisticated
culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a
secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and
kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her
powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she
would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her
most legitimate advantage.  An interpreter ought always to
have stood between her and the world.  Her will was not very
flexible, and it generally opposed her interest.  Her temper
was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether
unbending.

Anne’s character was milder and more subdued; she wanted
the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well
endowed with quiet virtues of her own.  Long-suffering,
self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional
reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and
covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of
nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted.  Neither Emily nor
Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers
at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the
impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such
stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled
them to amass.  I may sum up all by saying, that for
strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than
nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the
intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and
truly great.

This notice has been written because I felt it a sacred duty
to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear
names free from soil.

CURRER BELL

September 19, 1850.

EDITOR’S PREFACE
TO THE NEW EDITION OF
‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS’

I have just read over
‘Wuthering Heights,’ and, for the first time, have
obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really
are) its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears
to other people—to strangers who knew nothing of the
author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes
of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the
natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the
West Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.

To all such ‘Wuthering Heights’ must appear a rude
and strange production.  The wild moors of the North of
England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners,
the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered
inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great
measure unintelligible, and—where
intelligible—repulsive.  Men and women who, perhaps,
naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and
little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to
observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of
language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong
utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled
aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds
and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and
unchecked, except by Mentors as harsh as themselves.  A
large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the
introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with
all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by
the initial and final letter only—a blank line filling the
interval.  I may as well say at once that, for this
circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it,
myself, a rational plan to write words at full length.  The
practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which
profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse,
strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and
futile.  I cannot tell what good it does—what feeling
it spares—what horror it conceals.

With regard to the rusticity of ‘Wuthering
heights,’ I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. 
It is rustic all through.  It is moorish, and wild, and
knotty as a root of heath.  Nor was it natural that it
should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and
nursling of the moors.  Doubtless, had her lot been cast in
a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have
possessed another character.  Even had chance or taste led
her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it
otherwise.  Had Ellis Bell been a lady or a gentleman
accustomed to what is called ‘the world,’ her view of
a remote and unreclaimed region, as well as of the dwellers
therein, would have differed greatly from that actually taken by
the home-bred country girl.  Doubtless it would have been
wider—more comprehensive: whether it would have been more
original or more truthful is not so certain.  As far as the
scenery and locality are concerned, it could scarcely have been
so sympathetic: Ellis Bell did not describe as one whose eye and
taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were
far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in,
and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the
heather, their produce.  Her descriptions, then, of natural
scenery are what they should be, and all they should be.

Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is
different.  I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more
practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than
a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent
gates.  My sister’s disposition was not naturally
gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to
seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills,
she rarely crossed the threshold of home.  Though her
feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with
them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever
experienced.  And yet she know them: knew their ways, their
language, their family histories; she could hear of them with
interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and
accurate; but with them, she rarely exchanged a
word.  Hence it ensued that what her mind had gathered of
the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those
tragic and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret
annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled
to receive the impress.  Her imagination, which was a spirit
more sombre than sunny, more powerful than sportive, found in
such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff,
like Earnshaw, like Catherine.  Having formed these beings,
she did not know what she had done.  If the auditor of her
work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding
influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so
lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of
certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and
disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was
meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation.  Had she
but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong
tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured
fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom;
but on that mind time and experience alone could work: to the
influence of other intellects it was not amenable.

Having avowed that over much of ‘Wuthering
Heights’ there broods ‘a horror of great
darkness’; that, in its storm-heated and electrical
atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning: let me point
to those spots where clouded day-light and the eclipsed sun still
attest their existence.  For a specimen of true benevolence
and homely fidelity, look at the character of Nelly Dean; for an
example of constancy and tenderness, remark that of Edgar
Linton.  (Some people will think these qualities do not
shine so well incarnate in a man as they would do in a woman, but
Ellis Bell could never be brought to comprehend this notion:
nothing moved her more than any insinuation that the faithfulness
and clemency, the long-suffering and loving-kindness which are
esteemed virtues in the daughters of Eve, become foibles in the
sons of Adam.  She held that mercy and forgiveness are the
divinest attributes of the Great Being who made both man and
woman, and that what clothes the Godhead in glory, can disgrace
no form of feeble humanity.)  There is a dry saturnine
humour in the delineation of old Joseph, and some glimpses of
grace and gaiety animate the younger Catherine.  Nor is even
the first heroine of the name destitute of a certain strange
beauty in her fierceness, or of honesty in the midst of perverted
passion and passionate perversity.

Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in
his arrow-straight course to perdition, from the time when
‘the little black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if it
came from the Devil,’ was first unrolled out of the bundle
and set on its feet in the farmhouse kitchen, to the hour when
Nelly Dean found the grim, stalwart corpse laid on its back in
the panel-enclosed bed, with wide-gazing eyes that seemed
‘to sneer at her attempt to close them, and parted lips and
sharp white teeth that sneered too.’

Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is
not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce
and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad
essence of some evil genius; a fire that might form the tormented
centre—the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal
world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the
execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him
wherever he wanders.  No; the single link that connects
Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely-confessed regard for
Hareton Earnshaw—the young man whom he has ruined; and then
his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean.  These solitary
traits omitted, we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor
gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life—a
Ghoul—an Afreet.

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like
Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.  But this
I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something
of which he is not always master—something that, at times,
strangely wills and works for itself.  He may lay down rules
and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will
perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any
warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer
consent to ‘harrow the valleys, or be bound with a band in
the furrow’—when it ‘laughs at the multitude of
the city, and regards not the crying of the
driver’—when, refusing absolutely to make ropes out
of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing, and you
have a Pluto or a Jove, a Tisiphone or a Psyche, a Mermaid or a
Madonna, as Fate or Inspiration direct.  Be the work grim or
glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but
quiescent adoption.  As for you—the nominal
artist—your share in it has been to work passively under
dictates you neither delivered nor could question—that
would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed
at your caprice.  If the result be attractive, the World
will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive,
the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve
blame.

‘Wuthering Heights’ was hewn in a wild workshop,
with simple tools, out of homely materials.  The statuary
found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw
how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart,
sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of
grandeur—power.  He wrought with a rude chisel, and
from no model but the vision of his meditations.  With time
and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands
colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the
former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost
beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss
clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy
fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.

CURRER BELL.