Hey, Happy Saturday. We're gonna pick up right where we left off. Last Saturday. Listener Erica requested our past episodes on the Brontes as Saturday Classics back in April, and these originally came out in twelve. They are probably the episodes that get the most praise from our long time listeners. They're one of the most popular episodes of the Sarah and Bablina era. So today's installment is called From Bronte to Bell and Back and it is all about the Bronte sisters rising fame as they began publishing their novels. Also about their brother, who you don't hear about as often. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and we are going back to the Bronte's today. We talked about them recently and when we left off the last EPISO, so we had just finished discussing their early lives. Charlotte, Brandwell, Emily and Bronte's early lives. The four children of the Reverend Patrick Bronte of Haworth and by their early twenties, these four brilliant Bronte children were in a bit of a rut. Really, Brandwell, who was expected to be a great artist or writer, the really the pride of the family is the only son, was working as a railway clerk and becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol and opium. The three girls, meanwhile, had at various points taken unpleasant teaching jobs to governessing jobs that they really weren't that well suited for. Yeah, so it seems like a blessing. One inty one. Their living aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, proposed using her savings to set the girls up with their own school. Charlotte quickly sweetened the deal by convincing her aunt father. To make the school work, they need some accomplishments like flawless French and a good grasp of Italian and German, So they hatched this plan. Arlen and Emily would study for six months at the Poncionale j and Brussels before coming back, reuniting with Anne and opening up their own school. So, yeah, it really sounds like a pretty good plan. But for nature loving home body Emily, leaving Howard was really painful. She loved being out in the Moors. For Charlotte, though it was thrilling. It was so exciting to finally get out into the world and experience some of all that she had been reading about for years and years. The two shy, kind of country Bronte girls must have really stood out among their fancier and their Catholic Belgian peers. That Madame J's school for girls, but they did pretty well with their lessons. They took private French lessons from Monsieur a J, who was a respected professor, and they were really doing so well, in fact, that at the end of their six months of study, Madame J suggested that they stay on for a while longer. Charlotte would teach English, Emily would instruct music, and that would be kind of a trade for their lessons, so they wouldn't have to keep on funding their own schooling. But in October eighty two word came that Aunt Brandwell was dead, so they headed home, finding that Brandwell was also there, having been fired from his railroad job after a discrepancy was found in the accounts, so brand Well was added again. It's no wonder that Charlotte was soon eager to accept the A J's invitation to return to Belgium and continue her studies and would keep Governess sing and Emily would tend to their father, who was increasingly suffering from cataracts. Again, in one year they'd reunite and finally start their school together. This guy around, however, Charlotte didn't exactly concentrate fully on her studies. Things were okay at first, but without her sister Emily there, she became very lonely, and she started to fixate more and more on her master, her professor and wills. And if you'd like to see another side of Charlotte, one that almost helps reconcile her as the author of the passionate book, Jane Eyre, I'd recommend checking out these letters to Monsieur a J. They're kind of like love letters but not. And consequently, Charlotte's friends, the a J's and their children and countless Bronte historians have tried to figure out what exactly was going on between these two, Whether Charlotte loved Monsieur a J in a romantic way, whether he was innocent and encouraging that admiration, you know, or whether he was just interested in her as a student, somebody who wanted to help learn French better and appreciate literature more. And then whether Charlotte even realized that her platonic obsession could be mistaken by some people as adulterous love for this guy who was married and had a large and constantly growing family. So she might have just been a little bit naive in that respect. But even if Charlotte was unaware of the way her feelings could be taken, Madam A Jay was not. As Charlotte's second year in Belgium, war on Madam Aja ended the pairs one on in English lessons. She started acting really coolly towards Charlotte as well, and Charlotte even came to believe that Madam Jay had another teacher spy on her. By the end of the year, Charlotte was packing her bags to head back to Haworth, where she started correspondence. Those first letters must have been appropriate enough. We don't know what they contained because they don't survive. But after a few months, Monsieur a j stopped writing back and Charlotte got even more desperate. Fortunately, though, these letters do survive because even though Monsieur a ripped them up, his wife stitched them back together. As quote a safeguard for the future. According to Charlotte Bronte's biographer Rebecca Frasier, Um, just to give you an example of the kind of writing we're talking about, I mean, it does sound very much like a love letter. Here's an example from a January letter. Charlotte wrote, quote, all I know is that I cannot that I will not resign myself to lose wholly the friendship of my master. I would rather suffer the greatest physical pain and then always have my heart lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall be all together without hope. If he gives me a little, just a little, I shall be satisfied, happy, I shall have reason for living, on for working. So like a love letter, but again not quite like a love letter, something kind of in between, but also clearly kind of inappropriate. Yeah, it's ambiguous, but there's definitely some sort of very strong attachment there. Meanwhile, though, the Bronte ladies were making arrangements for their long planned school because Mr Bronte's cataracts had nearly blinded him. Emily and Charlotte decided the school should be at the parsonage, which was kind of a bad idea since, as you'll remember, it was pretty out of the way, so it was impossible for students to find. And that was really unfortunate too, because by the summer of all of the Bronte children were at home again and unemployed. Lloyd Anne had resigned her four year position as the governess for the Robinson family in June, mysteriously writing in her secret diary. By the way, I quote, I was then at Thorpe Green and now I am only just escaped from it. During my stay, I've had some very unpleasant and undreamt of experiences of human nature. Kind of a strange thing to write a month after you leave a job. And then in July Brandwell had his own sort of strange exit from employment. He had been working for the Robinson's as a tutor also, and he got a note from his boss Will on vacation. The gist of it was, I know what you did. It's despicable. Don't ever contact me or my family again. Quote on pain of exposure nikes. So that's a pretty serious way to be dismissed. And it seems that while Charlotte was wrestling with her possibly adulterous feelings for Monsieur j but likely no more than feelings. Brand Will was having an act full affair with the mother of his pupil, appropriately enough named Mrs Robinson um or at least that was Brandwell's version of the story, the one that he told to his drinking buddies that he had had a long term affair with the promises of eventually running away together, eventually marrying. Brandwell of course dreaming of being supported by this wealthier woman and being able to indulge his talents, you know, write poetry, right, novels, paint, that sort of thing. So again, it's unclear exactly what happened between the two of them, but there are some facts. At the time of Brandwell's dismissal, Mr Robinson was dying and Mrs Robinson did marry again, but she married again to a very well connected, wealthy man, not an improverished tutor. Mrs Robinson's doctor also later sent Brandwell large amounts of money, and her coachman eventually paid a secret visit to Brandwell. So something fishy going on there. We're just not sure what The only problem with the whole brand Will and was Robinson romance scenario is that Mr Robinson clearly thought only Brandwell was at fault, you know, hence the on pain of exposure. Yeah, that doesn't sound like he's going to expose his wife to public scrutiny. It sounds like everybody will blame brand Well if what happened comes out. Plus, let's just be honest, who could really trust Brandwell? At this point, he was getting into a pattern of raving all night long and passing out during the day. Over the next year, he set his bed on fire. He was actually rescued by Emily and he had to start sleeping in Mr Bronte's room, which was kind of a scary thought since Mr Bronte famously slept with a loaded pistol, and because Brandwell was kind of threatening his own life by this point. So during all of this drama, the three Bronte women were ironically creating their own drama. Charlotte had started writing The Professor, Anne was writing Agnes Gray, and Emily was working on Weathering Heights. But they still might have just toyed away on their novels like another piece of Angan or Gondol fiction. If Charlotte hadn't discovered a manuscript of Emily's poems in the Fall of Etive. I mean, you can imagine she was completely excited, completely thrilled to make this discovery, and she wrote about that a lot later, sometimes publicly, but in a later letter she wrote, they stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery I had made. I was sternly rated at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty. So you can imagine Emily was not pleased with her big sister reading her secret poem she had been working on. But after some strong convincing, Charlotte did talk Emily into publishing a group volume. So if all the sisters published, it would be okay, and they would also publish under gender ambiguous pseudonyms Kerr, Ellis and Acton Bell. A lot of speculation of out where that name Bell came from, though yeah, Bell was possibly chosen as a joke on Mr Bronte's curate, Mr Arthur Bell Nichols, who apparently really amused these women by bragging about his Bell relations. He'll come up again. So that's a good name to remember, even aside from the pseudonym relation. Indeed, so financed by their aunt savings and with Charlotte acting as the mysterious Bells literary agent, they published poems by Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell on the best paper they could afford, and the book got some great reviews. The critic called it a quote ray of sunshine. But it's still only sold two copies. But still they were published writers, which was something. I mean, it probably gave them the confidence to keep on writing and do what they were about to do, because by the summer of eighty six, the Brontes were really shopping around the novels, this time unwilling to front the entire cost of publishing themselves. They weren't willing to go vanity all the way, but they were finding no takers for their three novels. The same day that Charlotte attended her father's cataract surgery in Manchester, she found that they had been rejected. So she was in kind of a bad place. She was in Manchester, her father was recovering from his eye surgery, you know, a nineteen century eye surgery. You can imagine kind of unpleasant. It was a long recovery. It required total silence. Her novel wasn't getting anywhere, and so she started to write a new book called Jane Ere. She wrote for three weeks straight, and by the time her father had the okay to go home in September, she had written all the way through Jane and Mr Rochester's canceled wedding in Jane's White which when you read Jane here, I think it'll be neat next time. I next time I read it to know that breaking point in her writing, because looking back on it, you can see there's a definitive shift in the tone of the novel. And I can definitely imagine that first part being written in this frenzy. That's true. But three weeks that's amazing to me. Anne hadn't let rejection stop her either. She had started writing the tenant of Wildfill Hall, and with Charlotte home again, she Emily and Anne would take turns reading new chapters of their books around the fire, and I would just love to be a fly on the wall in that room. But by the following summer they had an offer from Newby Publishers in London for Anne and Emily's books, and Charlotte continued to shop the professor around, setting it to Smith Eldering Company, where it was read by A William Smith. Williams and Williams read the book and he rejected it, but not without also encouraging the author to submit something with a bit more action, maybe a bit like Jane Eyre. Perhaps so, Charlotte sent off her exciting new second manuscript to Williams in August. He read the manuscript, he handed it over to his boss, George Smith, who read it in one day, and the firm published the new novel by October, to almost immediate and overwhelming acclaim. I mean, just this remarkable that you had finished this novel, you know, polish it up in August, send it off and it would be published and a hit by October. It's hard to imagine today, I think a new book being as much of a cultural phenomenon as Jane Eyre was. Ellen Charlotte's dear friend wrote a visiting London during the first height of bell Fever, and she said, when I reached London, I found there was quite a furor about the authorship of the new novel. The work was quickly obtained and as soon as it arrived, it was seized upon and the first half page read aloud. It was as though Charlotte Bronte herself was present in every word, her voice and spirit thrilling through and through. Everybody was talking about it. Gradually, though, the tone of the reviews began to change from ecstatic to critical. Reviewers found the novel course your religious more salacious. Gossip started when Charlotte decided to dedicate the second addition to her literary hero William Thackeray. That was kind of a mistake because it turned out that Thackeray himself had a mad wife, and folks started guessing that Kerr Bell was actually Thackery's mistress. Yeah, you can imagine. All parties were pretty embarrassed by this discovery. Despite the gossip, though in the hurtful interpretations of Charlotte's work, at least her book was very popular. It was selling well. Weathering Heights, meanwhile, was getting terrible reviews. The Atlas called it quote strange and in artistic story. Many readers figured that it must have come from this particularly wicked mine. I mean today, it's it's just so strange to imagine people um dissing on Weathering Heights so much. It's a classic something you reathe in every high school English class. But um people were seriously disturbed by it at the time. Agnes Gray, a book novelist George Moore later called quote as simple and beautiful as a muslin dress, hardly earned any buzz at all. At almost worse, some also started accusing the Bells of being one writer, a theory which was encouraged by Emily and Anne's own publisher, who was hoping to cash in on the success of Cura Bell. The confusion finally got bad enough for Charlotte and to practically run to the nearest town in order to get to London meet Mr Smith and prove that there were at least two Bells. So then there's a big change in this story. It's this rapid ascent of fame. But in the fall of eight less than a year after the appearance of Jane Eyre, the Brontes world really began to transform. It started with Branwell dying in September, and he may have seemed like he was in constant danger of drinking himself to death or committing suicide, or having some unfortunate accident. While sleeping in the room with the loaded pistols, but no one in the family had really realized that he was seriously ill with tuberculos. This as well his alcoholism had effectively covered it up until almost the very end. And one of the details about all the Brontes lives would There are so many sad details we could choose from, but one of the saddest me is that Charlotte, Emily and Anne never told their brother that they had become famous authors. They finally did tell their father, but they just didn't feel up to letting Brandwell know, and as Charlotte later wrote, fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents misapplied. And that was their reason for holding it back for them, you know, the their fellow writer in childhood. Something about that so tragic. Another weird thing, According to Encyclopedia Britannica, some of Branwell's friends later thought he had co authored Weathering Heights because it was so masculine. And I mean that makes the whole thing that they never told him at all even more strange that it almost would fit with him. And after Brandwell's death, the bad news just kind of kept coming for the bronte As Emily got a cold at Brandwell's funeral. By December, she was also dead from tuberculosis. Her dog keeper walked in the funeral procession with the Brontes and their servants. He sat in their pew at the church, and he lay outside of her empty room for a week and how old. And just a few weeks after that, Anne was also diagnosed with tuberculosis, and unlike Emily, who had really resisted any kind of medicine, any kind of doctor's interference until the literal end um, Anne took every possible remedy, including a trip to the sea in May, but she died May away from home. So just one year brings three published novels, and the next year brings three family deaths. It's kind of the remarkable tragedy of the Brontes lives. And home was obviously so sad and so lonely for Charlotte, now the only surviving child of six. She wrote about how happy the dogs were when she came home because they thought that maybe the other two weren't too far behind, and she just felt really lonely. Her father was um a kind of distant during this time too, as you can imagine. So the next period of Charlotte's life bounced between this loneliness and depression at home and then brief getaways filled with festivals and treats that were worthy of a famous novelist, because of course, her fame hadn't gone away in the meantime, she had just kind of left it for a while. She finished her second which was really her third work entitled Shirley, and made a second visit to London, clad and Stable, picked out by her friend Ellen, and on her third trip to London, she was showered with attention from a publisher, George Smith. They even visited the zoo together, and they kind of stalked the Duke of Wellington together, which was really fun for her, Charlotte's hero, her childhood hero. I think they sort of waited for him like on his church root and caught a few glimpses of him. During this period, Charlotte also met the novelist Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, who turned out to be her future biographer and who was really quickly impressed by Charlotte's hard life story and her talent and wanted to help her rehabilitate her image a little bit, so gradually word was starting to slowly creep out that Kerr Bell was actually Charlotte Bronte, even back home in Yorkshire. And one funny account, Charlotte wrote to Ellen that her family's made Martha came to her saying, quote, I've heard such news, please, ma'am. You've been and written two books, the grandest books that ever was seen. And I thought it was really funny to learn that. While Charlotte started to handle her fame in London, you know, she got to meet her famous author friends and do all of that, do fun things. She was a little bit terrified with being known as this famous author back home because it meant that her actual her actual neighbors would go and try to figure out who were the characters in her book books, which does sound pretty terrifying, and she had to be around them all the time she did. She couldn't go go back to her tiny home and forget about it all. So amid all of this growing fame, though, Charlotte attracted a third suitor. We talked about her first two in the first part of this little series, but this guy was James Taylor, who was an agent at her publisher, and they've been writing to each other for some time, but really their correspondence was kind of third rung with her literary correspondence at her publishing. How she had always sort of preferred writing to Mr Williams, the guy who had discovered her. They talked about books and all sorts of things, and then she was obviously starting to get a bit of a crush on the publisher himself, Mr George Smith, he of the zoo trips and the lavish attentions. Mr Taylor, though, had kind of a thing for Charlotte, and he ended up being spurred on by his impending move to India to go ahead declare his love for her and propose. Charlotte of course refused, but it's certainly got her thinking about that growing crush on George Smith. But her next trip to London must have really squashed this idea. She wasn't the only one thinking about it too. It seems that even her father, Patrick Bronte, seemed to have some hopes or ideas that she might end up with George Smith. It turned out, though, on that next trip that Smith was clearly just going to be a friend, just going to be her publisher, and she made that quite obvious in a somewhat awkward way in her final complete novel, The Lett, by having the Charlotte like heroine not end up with the George Smith like Dr John Graham bretton which, of course I mean that's awkward because Mr Smith was of course reading these manuscripts and figuring out, oh, that would be awkward. So that sort of chance that love didn't work out for Charlotte. But she had other things to keep her busy when she wasn't so bothered by her own characterization in the press as an immoral course writer. She disliked her sister's memories being disrespected. According to an article in Women's Writing by Susan R. Bauman, it's largely Charlotte who's responsible for Emily's later reputation as the wild more poetus and Anne's as the devotional Christian writer. And she did this by shaming reviewers with biographical details of her sister's lives and sad deaths, editing and publishing more of their poems, and more strangely, sometimes even agreeing with critics negative assessments of their work. So consequently, some Bronte biographers considered Charlotte the Snafari's curator of her sister's writing. Bauman mentioned theories ranging from Charlotte tricking Emily into revealing her poetry, so not just like I can't believe you read my poetry, but let's get over it in a bit, something more serious than that, um, And then theories even as extreme as Charlotte purposefully destroying Emily's second novel after her death out of jealousy andesing to note here, since Charlotte is so very much responsible for the way people ultimately saw Emily Bronte and Bronte, her own life was shaped largely by Mrs Gaskell's biography that came out after Charlotte's death, which really turned her from this sketchy writer of naughty books to a heartbroken, admirable churchgoing woman who had never neglected her more I don't know quote womanly duties at home. She was the parson's daughter. She was the parson's wife, um, not the scandalous writer that she was depicted us. Charlotte's posthumous reputation was also shaped by her widower. Remember that Mr Nichols, the curate that we talked about earlier, this is why we asked you to remember him. While Charlotte had gone from making fun of him with her sisters to at least thinking of him as a nice guy, he had fallen head over heels without her even noticing. And on December fifty three she received the fourth out of nowhere proposal of her life. And this time Charlotte's father was furious that his poor Irish curate um kind of a lot like himself, would court his daughter. You know, he really thought that Charlotte deserved somebody with more money, somebody with more prestige. But instead of calling under some rock and disappearing, Nichols escalated this courtship to really an all out war with Mr Bronte. It was so awkward he handed in his notice, but he was stuck in the town for several months, having to see each other all the time. Charlotte once um Once Mr Nichols did eventually leave Howard, Charlotte eventually got permission from her father to start communicating with him and uh eventually start visiting him. She's thirty seven at this point, to just consider that, and then ultimately they married in June eighteen fifty four. Her father was supposedly too sick to attend the ceremony, so she was given away by her old friend, Miss Waller, whose school she had attended so many years before, and wore a white embroidered dress, a bonnet and a veil, and was said to look like a little snow drop there in the middle of the in the middle of the summer. By December, Charlotte was writing to Ellen hinting of a pregnancy, but from that point on she only got sicker and sicker. She died March thirty one, eight and it's kind of unclear exactly what she died of. I think it's generally accepted that it may have been tuberculosis was the official cause. It could have been also dehydration from really extreme morning sickness. That's another theory that's out there. Yeah, there are several theories, or just that Charlotte's health was not so great anyway, she had suffered from ill health for a long time, and that maybe her pregnancy um kind of escalated latent tuberculosis. But a month before her death, she had interestingly changed her will to benefit Mr Nichols, so his attentions to her during her sickness and four must have really impressed her because when they had first gotten married, she had set it up so he'd have zero control over her estate even if she died childless, which was kind of an unusual arrangement for a married couple at the time. And um, he wouldn't even be able to access her money for debts that sort of thing. Mr Nichols cared for Mr Bronte for six more years until his death. Mr Bronte is sometimes considered a too stern, too self interested figure, but one has to feel for him. I mean, he lost all six of his children. Of his own famous temper, he supposedly said quote, had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should, in all probability never have had such children as mine. And I think that's an interesting point to start to wrap this up on Mrs Gaskell's biography sort of wonders what would Charlotte Bronte have been like if she had been brought up in a healthy and happy situation. But Mr Bronte's own words how much his personality likely shaped his children, shows that it almost did seem to be a requirement that they had this isolated upbringing, This unhealthy atmosphere they lived in, and the development of their intense imaginations almost came from that. It's also neat too. I think that we rarely talk about our subjects in such a broad view as this, But I read a New Yorker article on the Bronte myth and noted that the sisters have really been quote remolded in successive generations to fit with different agendas, Freudian feminist agendas, and that's so strange to me. It has been interesting to learn about a biography and how that's connected to the writer's works, but also how much these lives are open to interpretation. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History all over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.

Hey, Happy Saturday. We're gonna pick up right where we left off. Last Saturday. Listener Erica requested our past episodes on the Brontes as Saturday Classics back in April, and these originally came out in twelve. They are probably the episodes that get the most praise from our long time listeners. They're one of the most popular episodes of the Sarah and Bablina era. So today's installment is called From Bronte to Bell and Back and it is all about the Bronte sisters rising fame as they began publishing their novels. Also about their brother, who you don't hear about as often. Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chocolate Boardy and we are going back to the Bronte's today. We talked about them recently and when we left off the last EPISO, so we had just finished discussing their early lives. Charlotte, Brandwell, Emily and Bronte's early lives. The four children of the Reverend Patrick Bronte of Haworth and by their early twenties, these four brilliant Bronte children were in a bit of a rut. Really, Brandwell, who was expected to be a great artist or writer, the really the pride of the family is the only son, was working as a railway clerk and becoming increasingly reliant on alcohol and opium. The three girls, meanwhile, had at various points taken unpleasant teaching jobs to governessing jobs that they really weren't that well suited for. Yeah, so it seems like a blessing. One inty one. Their living aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, proposed using her savings to set the girls up with their own school. Charlotte quickly sweetened the deal by convincing her aunt father. To make the school work, they need some accomplishments like flawless French and a good grasp of Italian and German, So they hatched this plan. Arlen and Emily would study for six months at the Poncionale j and Brussels before coming back, reuniting with Anne and opening up their own school. So, yeah, it really sounds like a pretty good plan. But for nature loving home body Emily, leaving Howard was really painful. She loved being out in the Moors. For Charlotte, though it was thrilling. It was so exciting to finally get out into the world and experience some of all that she had been reading about for years and years. The two shy, kind of country Bronte girls must have really stood out among their fancier and their Catholic Belgian peers. That Madame J's school for girls, but they did pretty well with their lessons. They took private French lessons from Monsieur a J, who was a respected professor, and they were really doing so well, in fact, that at the end of their six months of study, Madame J suggested that they stay on for a while longer. Charlotte would teach English, Emily would instruct music, and that would be kind of a trade for their lessons, so they wouldn't have to keep on funding their own schooling. But in October eighty two word came that Aunt Brandwell was dead, so they headed home, finding that Brandwell was also there, having been fired from his railroad job after a discrepancy was found in the accounts, so brand Well was added again. It's no wonder that Charlotte was soon eager to accept the A J's invitation to return to Belgium and continue her studies and would keep Governess sing and Emily would tend to their father, who was increasingly suffering from cataracts. Again, in one year they'd reunite and finally start their school together. This guy around, however, Charlotte didn't exactly concentrate fully on her studies. Things were okay at first, but without her sister Emily there, she became very lonely, and she started to fixate more and more on her master, her professor and wills. And if you'd like to see another side of Charlotte, one that almost helps reconcile her as the author of the passionate book, Jane Eyre, I'd recommend checking out these letters to Monsieur a J. They're kind of like love letters but not. And consequently, Charlotte's friends, the a J's and their children and countless Bronte historians have tried to figure out what exactly was going on between these two, Whether Charlotte loved Monsieur a J in a romantic way, whether he was innocent and encouraging that admiration, you know, or whether he was just interested in her as a student, somebody who wanted to help learn French better and appreciate literature more. And then whether Charlotte even realized that her platonic obsession could be mistaken by some people as adulterous love for this guy who was married and had a large and constantly growing family. So she might have just been a little bit naive in that respect. But even if Charlotte was unaware of the way her feelings could be taken, Madam A Jay was not. As Charlotte's second year in Belgium, war on Madam Aja ended the pairs one on in English lessons. She started acting really coolly towards Charlotte as well, and Charlotte even came to believe that Madam Jay had another teacher spy on her. By the end of the year, Charlotte was packing her bags to head back to Haworth, where she started correspondence. Those first letters must have been appropriate enough. We don't know what they contained because they don't survive. But after a few months, Monsieur a j stopped writing back and Charlotte got even more desperate. Fortunately, though, these letters do survive because even though Monsieur a ripped them up, his wife stitched them back together. As quote a safeguard for the future. According to Charlotte Bronte's biographer Rebecca Frasier, Um, just to give you an example of the kind of writing we're talking about, I mean, it does sound very much like a love letter. Here's an example from a January letter. Charlotte wrote, quote, all I know is that I cannot that I will not resign myself to lose wholly the friendship of my master. I would rather suffer the greatest physical pain and then always have my heart lacerated by smarting regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall be all together without hope. If he gives me a little, just a little, I shall be satisfied, happy, I shall have reason for living, on for working. So like a love letter, but again not quite like a love letter, something kind of in between, but also clearly kind of inappropriate. Yeah, it's ambiguous, but there's definitely some sort of very strong attachment there. Meanwhile, though, the Bronte ladies were making arrangements for their long planned school because Mr Bronte's cataracts had nearly blinded him. Emily and Charlotte decided the school should be at the parsonage, which was kind of a bad idea since, as you'll remember, it was pretty out of the way, so it was impossible for students to find. And that was really unfortunate too, because by the summer of all of the Bronte children were at home again and unemployed. Lloyd Anne had resigned her four year position as the governess for the Robinson family in June, mysteriously writing in her secret diary. By the way, I quote, I was then at Thorpe Green and now I am only just escaped from it. During my stay, I've had some very unpleasant and undreamt of experiences of human nature. Kind of a strange thing to write a month after you leave a job. And then in July Brandwell had his own sort of strange exit from employment. He had been working for the Robinson's as a tutor also, and he got a note from his boss Will on vacation. The gist of it was, I know what you did. It's despicable. Don't ever contact me or my family again. Quote on pain of exposure nikes. So that's a pretty serious way to be dismissed. And it seems that while Charlotte was wrestling with her possibly adulterous feelings for Monsieur j but likely no more than feelings. Brand Will was having an act full affair with the mother of his pupil, appropriately enough named Mrs Robinson um or at least that was Brandwell's version of the story, the one that he told to his drinking buddies that he had had a long term affair with the promises of eventually running away together, eventually marrying. Brandwell of course dreaming of being supported by this wealthier woman and being able to indulge his talents, you know, write poetry, right, novels, paint, that sort of thing. So again, it's unclear exactly what happened between the two of them, but there are some facts. At the time of Brandwell's dismissal, Mr Robinson was dying and Mrs Robinson did marry again, but she married again to a very well connected, wealthy man, not an improverished tutor. Mrs Robinson's doctor also later sent Brandwell large amounts of money, and her coachman eventually paid a secret visit to Brandwell. So something fishy going on there. We're just not sure what The only problem with the whole brand Will and was Robinson romance scenario is that Mr Robinson clearly thought only Brandwell was at fault, you know, hence the on pain of exposure. Yeah, that doesn't sound like he's going to expose his wife to public scrutiny. It sounds like everybody will blame brand Well if what happened comes out. Plus, let's just be honest, who could really trust Brandwell? At this point, he was getting into a pattern of raving all night long and passing out during the day. Over the next year, he set his bed on fire. He was actually rescued by Emily and he had to start sleeping in Mr Bronte's room, which was kind of a scary thought since Mr Bronte famously slept with a loaded pistol, and because Brandwell was kind of threatening his own life by this point. So during all of this drama, the three Bronte women were ironically creating their own drama. Charlotte had started writing The Professor, Anne was writing Agnes Gray, and Emily was working on Weathering Heights. But they still might have just toyed away on their novels like another piece of Angan or Gondol fiction. If Charlotte hadn't discovered a manuscript of Emily's poems in the Fall of Etive. I mean, you can imagine she was completely excited, completely thrilled to make this discovery, and she wrote about that a lot later, sometimes publicly, but in a later letter she wrote, they stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery I had made. I was sternly rated at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty. So you can imagine Emily was not pleased with her big sister reading her secret poem she had been working on. But after some strong convincing, Charlotte did talk Emily into publishing a group volume. So if all the sisters published, it would be okay, and they would also publish under gender ambiguous pseudonyms Kerr, Ellis and Acton Bell. A lot of speculation of out where that name Bell came from, though yeah, Bell was possibly chosen as a joke on Mr Bronte's curate, Mr Arthur Bell Nichols, who apparently really amused these women by bragging about his Bell relations. He'll come up again. So that's a good name to remember, even aside from the pseudonym relation. Indeed, so financed by their aunt savings and with Charlotte acting as the mysterious Bells literary agent, they published poems by Kerr Ellis and Acton Bell on the best paper they could afford, and the book got some great reviews. The critic called it a quote ray of sunshine. But it's still only sold two copies. But still they were published writers, which was something. I mean, it probably gave them the confidence to keep on writing and do what they were about to do, because by the summer of eighty six, the Brontes were really shopping around the novels, this time unwilling to front the entire cost of publishing themselves. They weren't willing to go vanity all the way, but they were finding no takers for their three novels. The same day that Charlotte attended her father's cataract surgery in Manchester, she found that they had been rejected. So she was in kind of a bad place. She was in Manchester, her father was recovering from his eye surgery, you know, a nineteen century eye surgery. You can imagine kind of unpleasant. It was a long recovery. It required total silence. Her novel wasn't getting anywhere, and so she started to write a new book called Jane Ere. She wrote for three weeks straight, and by the time her father had the okay to go home in September, she had written all the way through Jane and Mr Rochester's canceled wedding in Jane's White which when you read Jane here, I think it'll be neat next time. I next time I read it to know that breaking point in her writing, because looking back on it, you can see there's a definitive shift in the tone of the novel. And I can definitely imagine that first part being written in this frenzy. That's true. But three weeks that's amazing to me. Anne hadn't let rejection stop her either. She had started writing the tenant of Wildfill Hall, and with Charlotte home again, she Emily and Anne would take turns reading new chapters of their books around the fire, and I would just love to be a fly on the wall in that room. But by the following summer they had an offer from Newby Publishers in London for Anne and Emily's books, and Charlotte continued to shop the professor around, setting it to Smith Eldering Company, where it was read by A William Smith. Williams and Williams read the book and he rejected it, but not without also encouraging the author to submit something with a bit more action, maybe a bit like Jane Eyre. Perhaps so, Charlotte sent off her exciting new second manuscript to Williams in August. He read the manuscript, he handed it over to his boss, George Smith, who read it in one day, and the firm published the new novel by October, to almost immediate and overwhelming acclaim. I mean, just this remarkable that you had finished this novel, you know, polish it up in August, send it off and it would be published and a hit by October. It's hard to imagine today, I think a new book being as much of a cultural phenomenon as Jane Eyre was. Ellen Charlotte's dear friend wrote a visiting London during the first height of bell Fever, and she said, when I reached London, I found there was quite a furor about the authorship of the new novel. The work was quickly obtained and as soon as it arrived, it was seized upon and the first half page read aloud. It was as though Charlotte Bronte herself was present in every word, her voice and spirit thrilling through and through. Everybody was talking about it. Gradually, though, the tone of the reviews began to change from ecstatic to critical. Reviewers found the novel course your religious more salacious. Gossip started when Charlotte decided to dedicate the second addition to her literary hero William Thackeray. That was kind of a mistake because it turned out that Thackeray himself had a mad wife, and folks started guessing that Kerr Bell was actually Thackery's mistress. Yeah, you can imagine. All parties were pretty embarrassed by this discovery. Despite the gossip, though in the hurtful interpretations of Charlotte's work, at least her book was very popular. It was selling well. Weathering Heights, meanwhile, was getting terrible reviews. The Atlas called it quote strange and in artistic story. Many readers figured that it must have come from this particularly wicked mine. I mean today, it's it's just so strange to imagine people um dissing on Weathering Heights so much. It's a classic something you reathe in every high school English class. But um people were seriously disturbed by it at the time. Agnes Gray, a book novelist George Moore later called quote as simple and beautiful as a muslin dress, hardly earned any buzz at all. At almost worse, some also started accusing the Bells of being one writer, a theory which was encouraged by Emily and Anne's own publisher, who was hoping to cash in on the success of Cura Bell. The confusion finally got bad enough for Charlotte and to practically run to the nearest town in order to get to London meet Mr Smith and prove that there were at least two Bells. So then there's a big change in this story. It's this rapid ascent of fame. But in the fall of eight less than a year after the appearance of Jane Eyre, the Brontes world really began to transform. It started with Branwell dying in September, and he may have seemed like he was in constant danger of drinking himself to death or committing suicide, or having some unfortunate accident. While sleeping in the room with the loaded pistols, but no one in the family had really realized that he was seriously ill with tuberculos. This as well his alcoholism had effectively covered it up until almost the very end. And one of the details about all the Brontes lives would There are so many sad details we could choose from, but one of the saddest me is that Charlotte, Emily and Anne never told their brother that they had become famous authors. They finally did tell their father, but they just didn't feel up to letting Brandwell know, and as Charlotte later wrote, fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents misapplied. And that was their reason for holding it back for them, you know, the their fellow writer in childhood. Something about that so tragic. Another weird thing, According to Encyclopedia Britannica, some of Branwell's friends later thought he had co authored Weathering Heights because it was so masculine. And I mean that makes the whole thing that they never told him at all even more strange that it almost would fit with him. And after Brandwell's death, the bad news just kind of kept coming for the bronte As Emily got a cold at Brandwell's funeral. By December, she was also dead from tuberculosis. Her dog keeper walked in the funeral procession with the Brontes and their servants. He sat in their pew at the church, and he lay outside of her empty room for a week and how old. And just a few weeks after that, Anne was also diagnosed with tuberculosis, and unlike Emily, who had really resisted any kind of medicine, any kind of doctor's interference until the literal end um, Anne took every possible remedy, including a trip to the sea in May, but she died May away from home. So just one year brings three published novels, and the next year brings three family deaths. It's kind of the remarkable tragedy of the Brontes lives. And home was obviously so sad and so lonely for Charlotte, now the only surviving child of six. She wrote about how happy the dogs were when she came home because they thought that maybe the other two weren't too far behind, and she just felt really lonely. Her father was um a kind of distant during this time too, as you can imagine. So the next period of Charlotte's life bounced between this loneliness and depression at home and then brief getaways filled with festivals and treats that were worthy of a famous novelist, because of course, her fame hadn't gone away in the meantime, she had just kind of left it for a while. She finished her second which was really her third work entitled Shirley, and made a second visit to London, clad and Stable, picked out by her friend Ellen, and on her third trip to London, she was showered with attention from a publisher, George Smith. They even visited the zoo together, and they kind of stalked the Duke of Wellington together, which was really fun for her, Charlotte's hero, her childhood hero. I think they sort of waited for him like on his church root and caught a few glimpses of him. During this period, Charlotte also met the novelist Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, who turned out to be her future biographer and who was really quickly impressed by Charlotte's hard life story and her talent and wanted to help her rehabilitate her image a little bit, so gradually word was starting to slowly creep out that Kerr Bell was actually Charlotte Bronte, even back home in Yorkshire. And one funny account, Charlotte wrote to Ellen that her family's made Martha came to her saying, quote, I've heard such news, please, ma'am. You've been and written two books, the grandest books that ever was seen. And I thought it was really funny to learn that. While Charlotte started to handle her fame in London, you know, she got to meet her famous author friends and do all of that, do fun things. She was a little bit terrified with being known as this famous author back home because it meant that her actual her actual neighbors would go and try to figure out who were the characters in her book books, which does sound pretty terrifying, and she had to be around them all the time she did. She couldn't go go back to her tiny home and forget about it all. So amid all of this growing fame, though, Charlotte attracted a third suitor. We talked about her first two in the first part of this little series, but this guy was James Taylor, who was an agent at her publisher, and they've been writing to each other for some time, but really their correspondence was kind of third rung with her literary correspondence at her publishing. How she had always sort of preferred writing to Mr Williams, the guy who had discovered her. They talked about books and all sorts of things, and then she was obviously starting to get a bit of a crush on the publisher himself, Mr George Smith, he of the zoo trips and the lavish attentions. Mr Taylor, though, had kind of a thing for Charlotte, and he ended up being spurred on by his impending move to India to go ahead declare his love for her and propose. Charlotte of course refused, but it's certainly got her thinking about that growing crush on George Smith. But her next trip to London must have really squashed this idea. She wasn't the only one thinking about it too. It seems that even her father, Patrick Bronte, seemed to have some hopes or ideas that she might end up with George Smith. It turned out, though, on that next trip that Smith was clearly just going to be a friend, just going to be her publisher, and she made that quite obvious in a somewhat awkward way in her final complete novel, The Lett, by having the Charlotte like heroine not end up with the George Smith like Dr John Graham bretton which, of course I mean that's awkward because Mr Smith was of course reading these manuscripts and figuring out, oh, that would be awkward. So that sort of chance that love didn't work out for Charlotte. But she had other things to keep her busy when she wasn't so bothered by her own characterization in the press as an immoral course writer. She disliked her sister's memories being disrespected. According to an article in Women's Writing by Susan R. Bauman, it's largely Charlotte who's responsible for Emily's later reputation as the wild more poetus and Anne's as the devotional Christian writer. And she did this by shaming reviewers with biographical details of her sister's lives and sad deaths, editing and publishing more of their poems, and more strangely, sometimes even agreeing with critics negative assessments of their work. So consequently, some Bronte biographers considered Charlotte the Snafari's curator of her sister's writing. Bauman mentioned theories ranging from Charlotte tricking Emily into revealing her poetry, so not just like I can't believe you read my poetry, but let's get over it in a bit, something more serious than that, um, And then theories even as extreme as Charlotte purposefully destroying Emily's second novel after her death out of jealousy andesing to note here, since Charlotte is so very much responsible for the way people ultimately saw Emily Bronte and Bronte, her own life was shaped largely by Mrs Gaskell's biography that came out after Charlotte's death, which really turned her from this sketchy writer of naughty books to a heartbroken, admirable churchgoing woman who had never neglected her more I don't know quote womanly duties at home. She was the parson's daughter. She was the parson's wife, um, not the scandalous writer that she was depicted us. Charlotte's posthumous reputation was also shaped by her widower. Remember that Mr Nichols, the curate that we talked about earlier, this is why we asked you to remember him. While Charlotte had gone from making fun of him with her sisters to at least thinking of him as a nice guy, he had fallen head over heels without her even noticing. And on December fifty three she received the fourth out of nowhere proposal of her life. And this time Charlotte's father was furious that his poor Irish curate um kind of a lot like himself, would court his daughter. You know, he really thought that Charlotte deserved somebody with more money, somebody with more prestige. But instead of calling under some rock and disappearing, Nichols escalated this courtship to really an all out war with Mr Bronte. It was so awkward he handed in his notice, but he was stuck in the town for several months, having to see each other all the time. Charlotte once um Once Mr Nichols did eventually leave Howard, Charlotte eventually got permission from her father to start communicating with him and uh eventually start visiting him. She's thirty seven at this point, to just consider that, and then ultimately they married in June eighteen fifty four. Her father was supposedly too sick to attend the ceremony, so she was given away by her old friend, Miss Waller, whose school she had attended so many years before, and wore a white embroidered dress, a bonnet and a veil, and was said to look like a little snow drop there in the middle of the in the middle of the summer. By December, Charlotte was writing to Ellen hinting of a pregnancy, but from that point on she only got sicker and sicker. She died March thirty one, eight and it's kind of unclear exactly what she died of. I think it's generally accepted that it may have been tuberculosis was the official cause. It could have been also dehydration from really extreme morning sickness. That's another theory that's out there. Yeah, there are several theories, or just that Charlotte's health was not so great anyway, she had suffered from ill health for a long time, and that maybe her pregnancy um kind of escalated latent tuberculosis. But a month before her death, she had interestingly changed her will to benefit Mr Nichols, so his attentions to her during her sickness and four must have really impressed her because when they had first gotten married, she had set it up so he'd have zero control over her estate even if she died childless, which was kind of an unusual arrangement for a married couple at the time. And um, he wouldn't even be able to access her money for debts that sort of thing. Mr Nichols cared for Mr Bronte for six more years until his death. Mr Bronte is sometimes considered a too stern, too self interested figure, but one has to feel for him. I mean, he lost all six of his children. Of his own famous temper, he supposedly said quote, had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should, in all probability never have had such children as mine. And I think that's an interesting point to start to wrap this up on Mrs Gaskell's biography sort of wonders what would Charlotte Bronte have been like if she had been brought up in a healthy and happy situation. But Mr Bronte's own words how much his personality likely shaped his children, shows that it almost did seem to be a requirement that they had this isolated upbringing, This unhealthy atmosphere they lived in, and the development of their intense imaginations almost came from that. It's also neat too. I think that we rarely talk about our subjects in such a broad view as this, But I read a New Yorker article on the Bronte myth and noted that the sisters have really been quote remolded in successive generations to fit with different agendas, Freudian feminist agendas, and that's so strange to me. It has been interesting to learn about a biography and how that's connected to the writer's works, but also how much these lives are open to interpretation. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History all over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. 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