In the letter below, Charlotte Brontë writes to her publisher, William Smith Williams, responding to a negative review of Jane Eyre. The review was featured in The Christian Remembrancer, a journal associated with the High Anglican Church. The anonymous critic, after explaining why the novel must have been written by a woman, condemned the book’s “deathbed of unrepentant sin,”and implored Brontë “be a little more trustful of the reality of human goodness, and a little less anxious to detect its alloy of evil.”
To W. S. Williams,
[3 April 1848]
[Haworth]
My dear Sir
I have received “the Christian Remembrancer”, and read the review. It is written with some ability—but, to do justice was evidently not the critic’s main object; therefore he excuses himself from performing that duty.
I daresay the reviewer imagines that Currer Bell [Brontë pseudonym] ought to be extremely afflicted, very much cut up by some smart things he says: this however is not the case. C Bell is, on the whole, rather encouraged than dispirited by the review: the hard-wrung praise extorted reluctantly from a foe is the most precious praise of all; you are sure that this, at least, has no admixture of flattery. I fear he has too high an opinion of my abilities and of what I can do; but that is his own fault. In other respects, he aims his shafts in the dark, and the success, or rather, ill-success of his hits makes me laugh rather than cry. His shafts of sarcasm are nicely polished, keenly pointed; he should not have wasted them in shooting at a mark he cannot see.
I hope such reviews will not make much difference with me, and that if the spirit moves me in future to say anything about priests &c. I shall say it with the same freedom as heretofore. I hope also that their anger will not make me angry; as a body, I had no ill-will against them to begin with, and I feel it would be an error to let opposition engender such ill-will. A few individuals may possibly be called upon to sit for their portraits some time—if their brethren, in general, dislike the resemblance and abuse the artist—tant pis!
Believe me, my dear Sir
Yours sincerely
C Bell
From The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Vol. 2. Edited by Margaret Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
The original review in The Christian Remembrancer.
The Telegraph argues that Villette was a more revolutionary novel than Jane Eyre.
The Daily Beast chronicles Charlotte Brontë’s rivalry with Jane Austen.
Harvard’s libraries have a short piece on Brontë’s dedication of Jane Eyre to W. M. Thackeray, whom she greatly admired.