Letter to Charlotte Brontë, dated Wellington, New Zealand, 24 July 1848
Henry H. Bonnell Collection, bequest of Helen Safford Bonnell, 1969
When she published her first novel, Jane Eyre, in 1847, Charlotte Brontë told almost no one. But she did send a copy, along with Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey, to her good friend Mary Taylor in Wellington, New Zealand. Taylor responded with this affectionate letter. By the time it arrived in Yorkshire (five months after she had dispatched it from Wellington), Emily was near death and “Currer Bell” was a literary star.
-ary either goes into his office for a piece of bread, or he goes from enthusiasm, & that is both too good & too bad a quality for St. John. It’s a bit of your absurd charity to believe in such a man. You have done wisely in choosing to imagine a high class of readers. You never stop to explain or defend anything & never seem bothered with the idea—if Mrs. Fairfax or any other well intentioned fool gets hold of this what will she think? And yet you know the world is made up of such, & worse. Once more, how have you written through 3 vols. without declaring war to the knife against a few dozen absurd doctrines each of which is supported by “a large & respectable class of readers”? Emily seems to have had such a class in her eye when she wrote that strange thing Wuthering Heights. Ann[e] too stops repeatedly to preach commonplace truths. She has had a still lower class in her mind’s eye. Emily seems to have followed t[he] [b]ookseller’s advice. As to the price you got it [was] certainly Jewish. But what could the people do? lf they had asked you to fix it, how do you know yourself how many cyphers your sum would have had? And how should they know better? And if they did, that’s the knowledge they get their living by. If I were in your place the idea of being bound in the sale of 2! more would prevent [me]from ever writing again. Yet you are probably now busy with another. It is curious to me to see among the old letters one from A[unt] Sarah sending a copy of a whole article on the currency question written by Fonblanque! I exceedingly regret having burnt your letters in a fit of caution, & I’ve forgotten all the names. Was the reader Albert Smith? What do they all think of you?