#currer bell

[flowerytale]

Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell), from “Mementos”, featured in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Charlotte Brontë

The letter arrived in 1837, sealed with the authority of England's highest literary office.

Charlotte Brontë, twenty years old and burning with ambition, had dared to send her poetry to Robert Southey, Poet Laureate himself.

His response was surgical in its dismissal. Literature, he explained, could never be the business of a woman's life. She should focus on her domestic duties and abandon such inappropriate dreams.

Charlotte folded the letter carefully. She kept it. And then she kept writing.

She had already survived more than most people twice her age. At eight, she watched two of her sisters die from tuberculosis contracted at a brutal boarding school where children froze in unheated dormitories and disease spread like wildfire through classrooms.

The place was called Cowan Bridge and Charlotte would later immortalize its cruelty in Jane Eyre so accurately that headmaster threatened legal action.

Her childhood was Yorkshire moorland and relentless wind, a stone parsonage where books were only luxury and imagination only escape.

She and her siblings invented entire fictional worlds, writing obsessively, creating kingdoms on paper because reality offered them almost nothing.

Her father, a clergyman with more intellect than income, encouraged them to read everything and question everything. It was a radical gift in an age that expected girls to prepare for marriage and nothing more.

But every conventional path failed her. Teaching was soul-crushing. Working as a governess meant enduring employers whose children threw Bibles at her head.

A plan to open a school with Emily collapsed. Writing wasn't a choice. It was what remained when everything else proved impossible.

In 1847, she published Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell. The book exploded.

A poor, plain, passionate heroine who refused to believe her worth was defined by her social position. Victorian England found it scandalous and irresistible. Some called it immoral. It sold anyway.

Then 1848 shattered her. Her brother Branwell died in September, destroyed by addiction.

Emily followed three months later, tuberculosis taking her at thirty. Anne died the next May at 29.

Three siblings gone in eight months, all in the same house, while Charlotte survived and wondered why.

She kept writing through the grief. She married quietly in 1854, choosing companionship over passion, admitting she felt esteem but not love.

She became pregnant. Her fragile health collapsed entirely. She died in March 1855, weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday, her child dying with her.

Four novels. Thousands of letters. A completely new kind of fiction where women's inner lives weren't decoration but the entire architecture.

Jane Eyre has never been out of print. The girl the Poet Laureate told to put down her pen outlasted all her doubters by two centuries. She just kept writing. That was enough.

Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre in pencil while caring for her father after cataract surgery in a Manchester lodging house in 1846.

She worked in tiny, cramped handwriting, chapter by chapter, creating one of literature's most enduring heroines while sitting in a rented room far from home.

The novel's famous opening line, "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day," came from those weeks of confinement.

The Brontë sisters published their first book, a poetry collection, under the gender-ambiguous names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

It sold exactly two copies. Rather than give up, all three immediately began writing novels.

Within two years, they had produced Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, three of the most influential books in English literature.

Interestingly, Charlotte was only 4 feet 9 inches tall and extremely nearsighted.

Contemporary accounts describe her as shy and physically unremarkable, which makes her creation of the "poor, obscure, plain and little" Jane Eyre even more poignant.

She wrote what she knew, and it resonated across centuries.

—

Charlotte Nicholls (21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855), commonly known by her maiden name Charlotte Brontë, was an English novelist and poet, and was the elder sister of Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë.

She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which was first published on 19 October 1847 under the pseudonym Currer Bell.

Jane Eyre was a great success on publication and has since been acknowledged as a classic of English literature.

—

[owilder]

He’s a 10, but he keeps a secret wife in his attic.

[andie-classics]

but what is so headstrong as youth? what is so blind as inexperience?

- jane eyre, charlotte brontë

[dorianslayyy]

So Ive almost finished reading The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall and I was going to wait until finishing it completely before blogging about it but.. my god

At least Gilbert has some goddamn decency (at the part where I am)

[clove-pinks]

Oh. Oh I like what Mr. Currer Bell has to say so far.

[ebonetnoir]

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell) Illustrated ILLUSTRATED SCARCE Publisher: Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York Copyright: 1878 CONDITION: This book is in good condition. Hardcover. Green cloth boards with gilt on spine. Covers are worn along edges and corners. The front board has a white stain. Brown endpapers. Bookseller markings on prelims in pencil along with a penciled in signature of the previous owner. This book is illustrated with beautiful steel-engraved plates. The frontispiece of Lowood has the original tissue guard. The binding is square and the text block and illustrations are crisp and clean. This is a handsome and hard to find copy of this classic masterpiece.

BUY ON ETSY

[aciesinstructa]

Evening Solace

THE human heart has hidden treasures,

In secret kept, in silence sealed;–

The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,

Whose charms were broken if revealed.

And days may pass in gay confusion,

And nights in rosy riot fly,

While, lost in Fame's or Wealth's illusion,

The memory of the Past may die.

But, there are hours of lonely musing,

Such as in evening silence come,

When, soft as birds their pinions closing,

The heart's best feelings gather home.

Then in our souls there seems to languish

A tender grief that is not woe;

And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish,

Now cause but some mild tears to flow.

And feelings, once as strong as passions,

Float softly back–a faded dream;

Our own sharp griefs and wild sensations,

The tale of others' sufferings seem.

Oh ! when the heart is freshly bleeding,

How longs it for that time to be,

When, through the mist of years receding,

Its woes but live in reverie !

And it can dwell on moonlight glimmer,

On evening shade and loneliness;

And, while the sky grows dim and dimmer,

Feel no untold and strange distress–

Only a deeper impulse given

By lonely hour and darkened room,

To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven,

Seeking a life and world to come.

- Charlotte Brontë, as Currer Bell