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But Charlotte's friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that, and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show every phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with a lover's ardour and impatience.
I have discussed the subject fully, for where is the use of being mysterious and constrained? it is not worth while." And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. "Ten years ago I should have laughed at your account of the blunder you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of Bridlington for a married man.
Caroline Helstone was sketched from Ellen Nussey, Charlotte Brontë's dearest friend, who furnished later much of the material for the best biographies of the novelist.
It was a modest sum only a hundred pounds, and of this I felt that Miss Nussey was entitled to a considerable share. But a hundred pounds was not to be despised. Besides, I loved my subject, and knew that I had still something left to say about it. So I closed with Mr. Macmillan's offer, and a few months later my little book, "Charlotte Bronte: a Monograph," was duly published.
But pupils were not to be had, and the outlook was discouraging. Two periods of service as governess, and the ill health that had followed, had taught Charlotte the danger that threatened her. Her experiences as a governess in the Sedgwick family were pictured by-and-by in 'Jane Eyre. In a letter to Miss Ellen Nussey, written at this time, she gives a dark vignette of her situation.
I know these feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the deeper for concealment. I'm an idiot!" Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement and to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse for Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years.
I was well aware that I could not put myself into competition with Mrs. Gaskell, even if I desired to do so, and I had no wish to appear to attack a book which I regarded as one of the masterpieces of English biography. But Miss Nussey was persistent, and she offered me the use of all Charlotte's correspondence with her, including the letters relating to her courtship and marriage, which Mrs.
The passage refers unmistakably to events at Haworth. It is further illuminated by another passage from an earlier letter. Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis torn between duty to herself and duty to her people. She asks Charlotte's advice and Charlotte gives judgment: "The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest."
And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "a silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She was then sixteen. Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher.
The kind motherly nature of Miss Wooler, and the small number of the girls, made the establishment more like a private family than a school. Here Charlotte formed friendships with Miss Wooler and girls attending the school particularly Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor which lasted through life.
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