How Charlotte Brontë’s Shyness Helped Make Her a Storyteller

“What is this new book of Miss Brontë’s, do you know?” Elizabeth asked Janet. “It will be very interesting to hear more of her sisters but rather difficult for her to do it well and discreetly.”

After hearing Charlotte was depressed, Elizabeth, Janet and Harriet Martineau discussed their concerns. Harriet told Charlotte to come stay with her in Ambleside, having heard “from one of her acquaintance in London that she is in a very unsatisfactory state of health…I shall do my best to take care of her.” The day before Charlotte went, Harriet explained why she was so accommodating to one so notorious. “I like Currer Bell’s letters: but then, I knew herself before I knew her letters; & that makes much difference…”

They had been writing since Harriet deciphered the note that came with Shirley. A few weeks after it, she was finishing dessert with her cousin Richard and his wife, Lucy, in their house near Hyde Park, when a messenger burst in with a suave-sounding note signed by Currer Bell: “It would grieve me to lose this chance of seeing one whose works have so often made her the subject of my thoughts.”

Shy as she could be, Charlotte relied on a social persona emboldened by anecdotes she coined for strangers and confidantes alike that could not fail to win their hearts.

Having come from an address only a half-mile away, where Charlotte was staying with George Smith’s family, Harriet sent a reply on foot offering tea the following evening. The next morning, a footman brought back an acceptance. “I shall try now to be patient till six o’clock comes,” Currer Bell had written. “That is a woman’s note,” Harriet decided. In a matter of hours, the face of Currer Bell would be revealed. Lucy wrote breathlessly to her teenage son in the country, “We were wondering what sort of a being this same Currer Bell would turn out to be; whether a tall moustached man 6 feet high, or an aged female, or a girl, or altogether a ghost, a hoax or a swindler!” As six o’clock approached, Lucy filled the darkening parlor with lighted candles to get the best view. They watched the door and the clock hands ticking towards six. There was a thunderous rap and the door burst open to reveal an impressively tall man. He announced he was collecting donations for homeless hostels. They sent him away and five minutes later a carriage drew up outside, the bell rang and after a moment of suspense the footman announced their guest.

Being partially deaf and using an ear-trumpet, Harriet misheard it as “Miss Brodgen” and had Lucy clarify that it was “Miss Brontë’,” one of the names she heard in London gossip. “In came a neat little woman, a very little sprite of a creature nicely dressed; & with nice tidy bright hair,” wrote Lucy. “I thought her the smallest creature I had ever seen (except at a fair),” Harriet remembered, “and her eyes blazed, as it seemed to me. She glanced quickly round; and my trumpet pointing me out, she held out her hand frankly and pleasantly.” Charlotte told William Smith Williams, “When I walked into the room and put my hand into Miss Martineau’s the action of saluting her and the fact of her presence seemed visionary.”

After introductions, she sat next to Harriet and looked at her with an expression of such open vulnerability and gratitude it caught Harriet off guard:

Such a look—so loving, so appealing—that, in connection with her deep mourning dress, and the knowledge that she was the sole survivor of her family, I could with the utmost difficulty return her smile, or keep my composure. I should have been heartily glad to cry.

After tea, they were left alone to talk. Harriet remembered there was something:

inexpressibly affecting in the aspect of the frail little creature who had done such wonderful things, and who was able to bear up, with so bright an eye and so composed a countenance, under not only such a weight of sorrow, but such a prospect of solitude. In her deep mourning dress (neat as a Quaker’s), with her beautiful hair, smooth and brown, her fine eyes, and her sensible face indicating a habit of self-control.

When Harriet assured her Jane Eyre was among the best novels of their time, Charlotte glowed with pleasure and relief. Harriet remembered how:

Jane Eyre was naturally and universally supposed to be Charlotte herself; but she always denied it calmly, cheerfully, and with the obvious sincerity which characterised all she said. She declared that there was no more ground for the assertion than this: she once told her sisters that they were wrong—even morally wrong—in making their heroines beautiful, as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on other terms. Her answer was: “I will prove to you that you are wrong. I will show to you a heroine as small and as plain as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” “Hence Jane Eyre,” said she, in telling the anecdote, “but she is not myself any further than that.”

She described writing feverishly in pencil in little square notebooks held close to her eyes, producing over 120,000 words in three weeks, until Jane left Rochester and Thornfield. She paused then finished it with more deliberation. She had to be conscientious in fiction, she told Harriet, to constrain invented scenes with the integrity of her own experience. Harriet recalled she insisted:

the account of the school in Jane Eyre is only too true. The “Helen” of that tale is—not precisely the eldest sister…but more like her than any other real person. She is that sister “with a difference.” Another sister died at home soon after leaving the school and in consequence of its hardships

…Charlotte Brontë was never free…from the gnawing sensation or consequent feebleness of downright hunger; and she never grew an inch from that time. She was the smallest of women and it was that school which stunted her growth.

Charlotte said she read all her reviews calmly, taking praise with a grain of salt and intelligent criticism as instruction, but was mystified by comments made about Jane Eyre and asked if they made sense to her. Harriet knew it had been controversial because of Charlotte’s exploration of the ambivalences of love, which she thought uncommonly well written, but did not consider that vulgar. However, she admitted, if she reread it she might understand criticisms better. Charlotte begged her to do that and always share her honest opinions about her writing. Harriet agreed. It was a promise that would ultimately poison their friendship. But at that moment, the women were new friends and rejoined the rest of the household to talk with them in the candlelight.

Knowing she was amongst sympathetic listeners that night, Charlotte recounted the sad story of her life of grief and isolation, just as she would go on to do with Janet and Elizabeth. Meeting Charlotte for the first time after no previous contact, even a stranger like Lucy Martineau could recount a thumbnail sketch of Charlotte’s autobiography the next day:

She lives in a most retired part of England, never seeing any body, & her Father has not slept out of his own house for the last 20 years. She is the only child left to him, 3 others having died of rapid decline within the last year.

The life of Charlotte Brontë, as narrated by Charlotte Brontë herself, was reaching the ears of anyone willing to listen.

*

“Remember, the Windermere Station is your railway goal. Then 6 miles of omnibus or coach; and a word to the driver will bring you on to my gate.” Harriet’s command led to The Knoll, the house in Ambleside she built solely for herself and to her own specifications. “I am living in a paradise,” she announced at the time, “and I feel it impossible to step out of it.” To her, the area’s beauty made the locals thrive. “Nobody seems ever ill here,” she observed, “I never saw such a place for robustness, for all the quantity of rain that comes down. As for me, I have not had one day of ailment the whole year.” She invited friends to join her. “From my little terrace, I will show you paradise spread before us…If the weather is bad, never mind. I find it beautiful to stand at my window & see it rain.”

That December week was marked by cold days, alternating cloud and sharp sunshine, frosting to clear-skied nights. When snow came, it only whitened the fell tops. “All this December, almost without intermission, we have had this yellow glow the whole day long,” Harriet wrote the day before Charlotte arrived, “and the most splendid skies at night. My starlight walks before my early breakfast are delicious. The rushing River Rotha seems to carry down gushes of stars to the lake.” Harriet rose early for an ice-cold bath then a walk in the dawn before she started writing at seven. She did not expect guests to join her and left them to follow their own routines. Charlotte told Ellen:

Her visitors enjoy the most perfect liberty; what she claims for herself she allows them. I rise at my own hour, breakfast alone…I pass the morning in the drawing-room—she in her study. At two o’clock we meet, work, talk, and walk together till five—her dinner-hour—spend the evening together, when she converses fluently, abundantly, and with the most complete frankness. I go to my own room soon after ten—she sits up writing letters till twelve. She appears exhaustless in strength and spirits, and indefatigable in the faculty of labour.

The next day, she took Charlotte to her lecture about the Battle of Crecy at the local mechanics’ institute. She noticed Charlotte could not take her eyes off her and became visibly moved as she described how Edward III demanded to know if his son had been injured or killed. Being told he was neither, Edward famously replied the boy was mighty enough to fight on to victory alone. Afterwards, the women walked back to The Knoll in silence. “In the drawing room the first thing I did was to light the lamp, and the first flare showed Charlotte Brontë with large eyes, staring at me, and repeating ‘Is my son dead?'”

Unmasked, Charlotte stepped into 1851 a public figure and a celebrity, known to all by her own name—and for her own talents.

Charlotte found Harriet impressive, marveling at her self-reliance and independence, certain both would guard against grief or loneliness. To Ellen she described her as:

a great and a good woman; of course not without peculiarities but I have seen none as yet that annoy me. She is both hard and warm-hearted, abrupt and affectionate—liberal and despotic. I believe she is not at all conscious of her own absolutism. When I tell her of it, she denies the charge warmly; then I laugh at her. I believe she almost rules Ambleside. Some of the gentry dislike her, but the lower orders have a great regard for her.

Nearby, the Kay-Shuttleworths returned to Briery Close and with the same relentless insistence that characterized all their interactions with Charlotte, pressed her to spend a few days with them. Seeking the excuse of alternative plans, she begged Ellen to come to hers instead of going straight home. Despite putting them off, James brought his carriage to take her on more of his sightseeing drives. Expecting to be exasperated, she was shocked when she saw him. Pallid and gaunt, he explained that his wife’s health had collapsed and left her bedridden. “I grieve to say he looks to me as if wasting away,” she confided to Ellen. His vulnerability broke her irritation and she let herself admit he had always been kind to her. His friendship, Charlotte concluded, must have been sincere after all.

At the weekend, Harriet took Charlotte to dinner at the home of Edward Quillinan, an elderly minor poet and widower of Wordsworth’s daughter Dora. Keen to integrate Harriet into the community she kept at a distance; he told her he might invite a crowd of eligible men. Where Charlotte might have flustered, Harriet gave him a flat “No” and told him she would neither change her lifestyle nor meet any locals. Quillinan acquiesced and told her he would only include one neighbor, Matthew Arnold, as long as she brought her guest too. Harriet was satisfied. After a couple of hours of conversation, the men bid them goodnight. Arnold described them:

At seven came Miss Martineau and Miss Brontë (Jane Eyre); talked to Miss Martineau (who blasphemes frightfully) about the prospects of the Church of England…I talked to Miss Brontë (past thirty and plain…) of her curates, of French novels, and her education in a school at Brussels, and sent the lions roaring to their dens at half past nine.

The underwhelming feeling was mutual. Charlotte thought him superficial but was told he would improve on acquaintance, like his mother. They never met again but within a few years he would come back to the memory of this supper to recycle it into an elegy. In it, he presents Harriet as a “stead- fast soul…unflinching and keen…which dared/ Trust its own thoughts” beside Charlotte, who “young, unpractised, had told/ With a master’s accent her feign’d / Story of passionate life.”

Superficially, he was referring to her writing but obliquely he was considering what Charlotte told him that evening. Her education in Brussels was one of the turning points in her life, initiating deeply conflicting private emotions and an unrequited love that took her years to recover from, its influence bleeding into all her books and transmuting into her currently gestating novel, Villette. Yet here with two strangers, she talked about it all. Shy as she could be, Charlotte relied on a social persona emboldened by anecdotes she coined for strangers and confidantes alike that could not fail to win their hearts, hitting their mark with Arnold, as they had in London with Harriet, at Gawthorpe with Janet, and with Elizabeth at Briery Close.

She left Ambleside for the Bradford train the day before Christmas Eve, took a cab to Birstall and Ellen, and stayed for Christmas. She got back to the parsonage and her father on New Year’s Eve. Before the end of that week, newspaper columns reporting morsels about the emperor of Austria moving into the London hotel later known as Claridge’s, of Spain’s scandalous Queen Isabella finding herself “again in an interesting state,” and the patenting of the world’s first dishwasher in New York, also announced “the authoress of Jane Eyre, Miss Brontë, has been on a visit lately to Miss Martineau at Ambleside.” Furthermore, as the new editions of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were picked up, the press presented Charlotte’s prefaces as an exposé: “The unknown authors! The Bells! At length, the veil has been drawn aside that shrouded the mystery of the relationship of Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell. They were three sisters…”

Charlotte’s life as an anonymous woman ended with the year 1850, which began with her neighbors’ whispers, and ended with her name in the press. Currer Bell, birthed for print, was effectively killed by it. Unmasked, Charlotte stepped into 1851 a public figure and a celebrity, known to all by her own name—and for her own talents.

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From The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life by Graham Watson. Copyright © 2025. Available from Pegasus Books.