Some works of literature have worked their way into the national consciousness and beyond. It’s difficult to imagine a world without Jane Eyre; it’s loved by readers across the globe today just as much as it was loved by Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century; it’s read by students for their exams, and by many others for pleasure. Jane Eyre is one of the great successes of English literature, and yet little could its author have guessed that was what it would become on this day exactly 178 years ago today.
It was on 24th August 1847 that Charlotte Brontë, using the pen name of Currer Bell, sent her manuscript volume of Jane Eyre the publishing house Smith, Elder & Co of Cornhill, London accompanied by this short letter:
This sparked an incredible turn of events. We know that the manuscript was first read by W. S. Williams of the publishing house who was so taken with it that he immediately brought it to the attention of his employer George Smith. Smith was even more mesmerised by the tale of the governess who overcomes all the odds and finds wealth and love, and we know from his memoirs that he read the complete manuscript in a day, cancelling a dinner party he had planned and dining on sandwiches instead. Terms were quickly agreed with the author, and within weeks the book was published in three volumes that were flying off the shelves in book sellers and in circulating libraries.
It was the epitome of an overnight success for a novel, but not for the author because, of course, Jane Eyre was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel. Her first written novel was The Professor, completed at the same time as Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but it remained unwanted and unpublished until after Charlotte’s death.
That much is well known, but what many fail to realise is the extraordinary pace at which Charlotte completed what has become one of the world’s best loved novels.
Charlotte asked Smith, Elder & Co whether they would publish The Professor on 2nd August 1837. They replied that whilst it had some points of interest they could not publish it. On 7th August Charlotte sent them the following letter informing the publisher that she was now working on another novel which might be more to their taste:
There was just 17 days between Charlotte sending that letter, to her completing Jane Eyre and sending its manuscript to Cornhill. An incredible period of productivity had clearly gripped Charlotte, and the result was a novel which can astonish readers today just as much as it astonished W. S. Williams and George Smith in August 1847. Here was a novel they could publish, here was a novel they did publish, and for that we can all be thankful.
I hope you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post, why not see if you can write a novel, a la Charlotte Brontë, in the space between my weekly posts?