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XXXVI: Charlotte Brontë and George Henry Lewes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Franklin Gary
Franklin Gary*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

When Jane Eyre first appeared (Oct. 16, 1847) the publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., sent a complimentary copy to a young journalist named George Henry Lewes. The compliment had unexpected results. Lewes afterwards wrote Mrs. Gaskell: The enthusiasm with which I read it made me go down to Mr. Parker, and propose to write a review of it for Fraser's Magazine. He would not consent to an unknown novel—for the papers had not yet declared themselves—receiving such importance, but thought it might make one on “Recent Novels: English and French”—which appeared in Fraser, December 1847. Meanwhile I had written to Miss Brontë to tell her the delight with which her book filled me; and seemed to have “sermonized” her, to judge from her reply.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1936 , pp. 518 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 Elizabeth C. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, World's Classics, p. 274.

2 Op. cit., p. 273.

3 Op. cit., p. 273.

4 All the passages from Charlotte Bronte's letters are taken from Clement Shorter's The Brontës: Life and Letters (London, 1908).

5 Mrs. Lynn Linton, My Literary Life (London, 1899), pp. 14–15.

6 Op. cit., p. 16.

7 Op. cit., p. 16.

8 I am indebted for some of the details in this paragraph to Professor Anna T. Kitchel's valuable study, George Lewes and George Eliot (New York, 1933). Miss Kitchel does not even mention, however, the friendship between Lewes and Charlotte Brontë.

9 F. Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London, 1893), p. 276.

10 Lewes was a great admirer of George Sand, whose first longer novel, written in collaboration with Jules Sandeau and published under the name “Jules Sand,” was called Rose et Blanche.

11 Op. cit., pp. 18–19.

12 Op. cit., pp. 25–26.

13 Op. cit., p. 95.

14 J. W. Cross, George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (New York: Harper, 1885), i, 138.

15 Cross, op. cit., i, 220

16 Linton, op. cit., p. 38.

17 Shorter, op. cit., ii, 191–192.

18 The Spell. An Extravaganza. An Unpublished Novel by Charlotte Bronte. Edited with an Introduction by George Edwin MacLean (Oxford, 1931). Legends of Angria. Compiled from the Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë by Fannie E. Ratchford with the collaboration of William Clyde DeVane (New Haven, 1933).

19 Jane Eyre, Chap. xii.

20 Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, xxxvi (Dec., 1847), 686–695.

21 George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1899), p. 10.

22 A History of English Criticism (New York, n.d.), pp. 493–495.

23 W. Archer and R. W. Lowe, ed., Dramatic Essays by John Forster and George Henry Lewes (London, 1896), Intro., p. xliii.

24 Shelley, A Defense of Poetry.

25 Edinburgh Review, clxxxiii (1850), 153–173.

26 Gaskell, op. cit., p. 342.

27 Cross, op. cit., i, 298–299.

28 Op. cit., i, 301.

29 Op. cit., i, 303.—The Warden had appeared the previous year, but without making any great stir.

30 Cross, op. cit., i, 306.

31 Op. cit., i, 344.

32 Op. cit., ii, 9.

33 Op. cit., ii, 3.

34 Op. cit., ii, 8.

35 Op. cit., ii, 11.

36 Op. cit., p. 342.

37 Jane Eyre is told by a character with whom Charlotte Brontë identifies herself: as Lewes said, it is an autobiography. The Professor, her first novel, is the autobiography of a man, William Crimsworth; and if one examines it closely one can catch glimpses of Charlotte Brontë identifying herself with him. In the third chapter, for instance, William Crimsworth describes himself as “weary, solitary, kept down like some desolate tutor or governess.” There is not the slightest reason for her adding that “or governess,” it seems to me, except to make his feelings clearer to herself. The phrase illuminates, for me, the entire process of transfusion which took place while she was creating The Professor: she became William Crimsworth, just as, more easily and more successfully in her second novel, she became Jane Eyre. Even the Legends of Angria, it might be said in passing, are told by Captain Tree or the Marquis of Douro, or Lord Charles Wellesley.

38 Villette, Chap. xxvii; see Chap. xxxiii for a similar incident.

39 Gaskell, op. cit., p. 392.

40 Villette, Chap. xxiii; Shorter, op. cit., ii, 221, 252.

41 This judgment on Emma is particularly interesting because Charlotte Brontë's unfinished novel, the only two chapters of which were published in The Cornhill Magazine for April 1860, with an introduction by Thackeray, was also called Emma. Was Charlotte Brontë attempting to rival Jane Austen?

42 Gaskell, op. cit., p. 371.

43 Villette, Chap. xxix.

44 Cross, op. cit., i, 221.