They met with little success at first, but when Charlotte received a rejection for The Professor from the small firm of Smith, Elder and Co., she came back with another proposal: Undaunted, Charlotte sent manuscripts of her novel The Professor, along with Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey, to various publishers, under the gender-ambiguous pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. In 1846 they published, at their own expense, a volume of their collected poetry-which sold a total of two copies. After a failed attempt to start their own school at Haworth, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne turned to writing as a potential source of income. In 1847 Charlotte and her sisters were back at home in Yorkshire after a stint as teachers in Brussels (which experience provided the inspiration for Charlotte’s later novel, Villette). Picture your siblings: how likely is it that you could all produce novels within the same year, which are still classics 150 years later? Not only that, but they were all women, at a time when women were not encouraged to write, much less publish.Īlthough the Bronte siblings began writing fiction as children, it was Jane Eyre that launched the sisters’ brief careers as published novelists. Partly they are famous because of the sheer improbability of what they accomplished. From the ZSR Library Special Collections copy.Ĭharlotte Bronte and her sisters, Emily and Anne, are, as author Tracy Chevalier puts it, “part of the furniture that makes up the house that is Britain.”
Title page from the first edition of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Babcock’s collection and is currently on view in the Special Collections & Archives Reading Room (ZSR625) as part of the exhibit Books and Bibliophiles at Wake Forest. ZSR Special Collections’ copy of the first edition of Jane Eyre was part of Charles H. Her best-known novel, Jane Eyre, was first published in 1847. Apmarks the 200 th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte.
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