The Letters of Charlotte Bronte, Volume One, 1829-1847

The Letters of Charlotte Bronte, Volume One, 1829-1847.
The correspondence in this volume spans the period from 1829, when Charlotte wrote her first letter to her father at the age of thirteen, to 1847, when she had just finished the Preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. A sentence in this first, youthful letter--"On account of bad weather we have not been out much, but notwithstanding we have spent our time very pleasantly, between reading, working, and learning our lessons ..." (105)--seems to prefigure, in a positive key, the famously ominous opening of Bronte's first novel: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" (1); and Smith notes such similarities between the letters and the fiction on a number of occasions. These instances confirm Bronte's own subtle acknowledgment, repeatedly amplified by critics, that she used her past as a resource for her novels. What is especially striking about the letters in this volume, however, is the clarity with which we see how self-conscious and determined Charlotte was about the distance she wanted to maintain between life and art. While she used her inner life as a resource for her writing, she insisted from adolescence forward on maintaining a sharp division between this inner life, which she shared only with her siblings, and her practical and external world. We see this division best in her relationship to her close lifelong friend, Ellen Nussey, whom she met at the infamous Clergy Daughters' school and to whom the majority of the letters in this volume were written. While there is no doubt that Bronte loved Ellen dearly and intimately, she never shared with her the imaginative life she participated in with her brother and sisters and strove to maintain in solitude when necessity took her away from home. These early letters help us to understand that Elizabeth Gaskell's famous (and often maligned) statement that "Henceforward Charlotte Bronte's existence becomes divided into two parallel currents--her life as Currer Bell, the author, and her life as Charlotte Bronte, the woman" (2) had its source not solely or simply in Gaskell's wish to emphasize to her public Bronte's womanliness, but in Bronte's own early and consistent practice of dividing her life along these very lines--out of modesty or artistic self-protection, or some combination of the two.