Deborah Lutz, author of
The Brontë Cabinet, wonders in
Out whether Charlotte Brontë was gay.
When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it quickly took its place as one of literature’s most famous love stories—straight love stories, of course, with the plain governess Jane falling for the mysteriously tormented, butch Rochester. Yet the intimacy between women in some of her lesser-known novels, especially Shirley, gives pause. And then there is the cross-dressing — Rochester as an old gypsy woman, Lucy Snowe in Villette as a young dandy flirting with a pretty woman. Shirley fancies herself an “esquire” because her parents “gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position.” “It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood... I feel quite gentlemanlike.” Her governess worries about her disdain for needlework and her habit of whistling because people will feel that she “affected masculine manners.” Evidence mounts in Charlotte Brontë’s letters to her best friend Ellen Nussey. When Vita Sackville-West read them in 1926, she had no doubt as to “what Charlotte’s tendencies really were.” She found them “love letters pure and simple.” Sackville-West (Virginia Woolf’s lover at the time) found Brontë’s courting language, the sort a Victorian man used to woo women, sapphic. In one letter, Brontë proposed to Ellen that they set up house together permanently, admitting in a postscript: “I am afraid of caring too much for you.” Nussey remembered Brontë stroking her head, exclaiming, “If I had but been a man, thou wouldst have been the very ticket for me as a wife.” (Read more)bronteblog
Was Charlotte gay has come up a number times over the years. If she was habitually attracted to other women besides seemingly being so to Ellen in youth , there would be more of a case. But almost invariably wherever Charlotte found herself though out her life , she favored the men way over the women .
BeantwoordenVerwijderenMr. White over the Mrs, and of course Belgium ; the fevered flirting with G. Smith ; her drive to marry in later life etc. If Charlotte was gay I think instead of suffering that ghastly loneliness after her siblings passed , she would have found solace in female companionship beyond Ellen's occasional visits. We would not have to wonder