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Updated: June 2, 2025
They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters to Ellen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of Charlotte Brontë's soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint. You see in them how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not let her go. Nor does she desire now to be let go.
I did not, for example, in my "monograph" publish the remarkable letters in which Charlotte told Miss Nussey the story of her strange love affair with Mr. Nicholls. Mr. Nicholls was still living, and I felt that these letters could not decently be published during his lifetime. Twenty years later, however, they were published by Mr. Shorter, not only during the lifetime of Mr.
That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line she drew between her "dear, dear Ellen", her "dearest Nel", and her sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. You may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her works. It was as if they had never been.
There is no important detail of her mere life that is not given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe repository of material relating to Charlotte Brontë.
Miss Nussey embraced this idea with enthusiasm, protesting that so long as she could see Charlotte "set right" in the eyes of the world, she would be perfectly satisfied with anything I chose to do. Accordingly, in the spring of 1866, I wrote three articles which appeared in Macmillan's Magazine.
Her friends all began by trying to do her good. Even Ellen Nussey tried. Charlotte is very kindly cautioned against being "tempted by the fondness of my sisters to consider myself of too much importance", and in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs her not to be offended. "Oh, Ellen," Charlotte writes, "do you think I could be offended by any good advice you may give me?"
I wrote them with fear and trembling, and I must add that I wrote them without any kind of encouragement from outside, other than that which I received from Miss Nussey herself. The general impression among the editors and critics of the day was that there was nothing new to be said about the Brontes, and that, even if there were, the public would not care to hear it.
She had possessed hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them from the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing, except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers. That one thing was her writing.
By "irresistible impulse" and "selfish folly", Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate passion for M. Héger's society. Peace of mind bears but one interpretation. Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will have none of this. He maintains very properly that the passage should be left to bear the simple construction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put upon it.
Miss Nussey evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are engaged this time, arguing possibly from the "painful blank"; and Charlotte becomes explicit. She speaks of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to take the little man. "But there is another thing which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than any of these. Would Mr.
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