March 5, 1839 is the date atop a letter penned by Charlotte Brontë that would prove a defining moment in the life of the Jane Eyre author. In the letter, Charlotte, eldest of the famous poet sisters, refuses a promising offer of marriage from the Reverend Henry Nussey. Clergyman and brother of her good friend Ellen Nussey, Reverend Nussey embodied many of the traits of a practical marriage -- namely stability and accessibility to friends and family -- something of which the twenty-three-year-old Charlotte would have been all too aware. But with a rather impressive amount of self-awareness, Brontë turned him down with a gentle hand, assuring him that her temperament and his role in the church would be a poor fit. The letter itself harkens back to all of the best aspects of Brontë's writing: her passion, sagacity, honesty, and above all her free spirit. This week in history, Biographile pays tribute to one woman's refusal to let social standards dictate her life choices by featuring some of her most independent and self-reliant words.
1. "I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy." (Letter to Reverend Henry Nussey, 1839)
2. "I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself." (Jane Eyre, 1847)
3. "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you."(Jane Eyre, 1847)
4. "No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure." (Villette, 1853)
5. "God did not give me my life to throw away." (Jane Eyre, 1847)
6. "Conventionality is not morality." (Jane Eyre, 1847)
7. "Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star." (Villette, 1853)
8. "School-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies — such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing." (Jane Eyre, 1847)
9. "I don't think, sir, that you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience." (Jane Eyre, 1847)
10. "I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward." (Qtd Elizabeth Gaskill, The Life of Charlotte Brontë,1870)
11. "If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends." (Jane Eyre, 1847)
biographile-charlotte-bronte
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