“HARMLESS PLEASURE”: GENDER, SUSPENSE, AND JANE EYRE

Abstract

“[I]T IS TIME THE OBSCURITY . . . WAS done away,” writes Charlotte Brontë in 1850. “The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest. Circumstances have changed” (“Biographical Notice” 134). The “little mystery” she coyly invokes here was not so trivial in the eyes of the literary world. From the moment that Jane Eyre appeared, reviewers speculated wildly about the identity of the authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. “[T]he whole reading-world of London was in a ferment to discover the unknown author,” writes Elizabeth Gaskell (271). When the identities of the three sisters emerged, it was something of a shock to most of the London literati to discover that the writers of these “coarse” and “repulsive” novels were young, sheltered Yorkshire women, daughters of a curate, who had seen little of the world.¹ Although the secret had been slowly coming out, bit by bit, it was in 1850 that Charlotte Brontë put the speculations to rest with her “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” written for a new edition of Wuthering Heights.