Her pen made the first move

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

• Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life by Lyndall Gordon
  Chatto, 418 pp, £17.99, March 1994, ISBN 0 7011 6137 X
• Shared Lives by Lyndall Gordon
  Vintage, 285 pp, £6.99, March 1994, ISBN 0 09 942461 4
• The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill by Miriam Bailin
  Cambridge, 169 pp, £30.00, April 1994, ISBN 0 521 44526 4

When Charlotte Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also made clear that her habit of day-dreaming threatened to unfit her for the ‘ordinary uses’ of the world. ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ he wrote. ‘The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.’ Modern feminists have understandably cited Southey’s advice as a representative instance of the oppressive assumptions that inhibited women’s writing. The recipient, however, responded more equivocally. While Brontë would later tell Elizabeth Gaskell that Southey’s letter had been ‘kind and admirable’, if ‘a little stringent’, to the writer himself she returned an answer in which genuine humility and self-abasement can barely be distinguished from an edgy and corrosive irony: