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Updated: June 2, 2025
Miss Nussey told me that she accompanied Charlotte and her husband one day on a walk over the moors. In the course of their conversation she asked Charlotte if she was writing another book. "No," replied Charlotte; "Arthur says I have no time for writing now, as I must attend to my duties as a clergyman's wife."
It will be seen that it was by accident rather than design that I wrote the book. Miss Nussey moved me to the writing of the magazine articles; Mr. Macmillan urged me to expand them into a volume. Otherwise I should have written nothing on the subject, and it would have been left to somebody else to start that Bronte cult which has since spread so widely.
She had come home after a visit to Miss Nussey. It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne's death. Charlotte went up to London. She saw Thackeray. She learned to accept the fact of her celebrity.
Almost her first words to me when I met her expressed her regret that Mrs. Gaskell had not done justice to Charlotte's life and character in her famous Memoir. To me this was rank heresy, for, like most other persons, I was indebted to Mrs. Gaskell for nearly all the knowledge I then possessed of the Bronte story. But, in reply to my defence of Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Nussey entered into particulars.
To this Charlotte meekly replied: "I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print." On the school being removed to Dewsbury Moor, Charlotte, whose health and spirits had been affected by the change, and Anne returned home. "I stayed at Dewsbury Moor," she said in a letter to Ellen Nussey, "as long as I was able; but at length I neither could nor dare stay any longer.
Currer Bell may fly to heaven to-morrow for anything I care." I do not vouch for the absolute truth of this story, but I give it as I heard it from Miss Nussey, and I am quite sure that when she told it to me she believed it to be true. Charlotte must have been more attractive than the world at one time believed her to have been, for she had several offers of marriage before Mr.
All this school-girlish jesting, the perpetual and rather tiresome banter, was a playing down to Miss Nussey. It was a kind of tender "baiting" of Miss Nussey, who had tried on several occasions to do Charlotte good. And it was the natural, healthy rebound of the little Irish gamine that lived in Charlotte Brontë, bursting with cleverness and devilry.
And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later: "Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity, 'I thought, Charlotte, no young lady should fall in love till the offer was actually made'? I forgot what answer I made at the time, but I now reply, after due consideration, Right as a glove, the maxim is just, and I hope you will always attend to it.
You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high, slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the "kind, kindling, liquid eyes" that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.
She thanks her heartily, and loves her "if possible all the better for it". Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell her of her faults and "cease flattering her". Charlotte very sensibly refuses; and it is not till she has got away from her sisters that her own heart-searchings begin.
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