Brief Lives; Charlotte Bronte, by Jessica Cox, Hesperus Press, £7.99

In reply to 29-year-old Charlotte Bronte’s written request for an opinion about her poetry in 1837, Poet Laureate Robert Southey wrote back: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not to be.”

Arguably, literature ought not be the business of anybody’s life if that means having no other occupation, interests or concerns.

But 174 years ago, before Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte sent their novels out under the pseudonyms of Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, the Poet Laureate’s view of the matter was the conventional one.

“…women, according to traditional conventions, produced children; men produced great literature,” states Jessica Cox in her 110-page biography of Charlotte, an otherwise engaging and insightful little book.

Charlotte Bronte later explained why the three sisters chose the cover of male pseudonyms:- “We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true.”

Jessica Cox says that not even Branwell Bronte knew of his sisters’ literary success before his early death in 1847.

Authors usually like to have their work acknowledged; literary success, then as now, is comparatively rare: continued anonymity is cold comfort, especially when one’s achievements are mistaken for another’s.

Asked to write a preface for an edition of Wuthering Heights and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte took the opportunity to correct the commonly-held belief that the author of these novels, as well as Jane Eyre, was one and the same person.

Although she valued her privacy and was content to protect it from the general public by using a man’s name for her books, Charlotte had an author’s pride; she did not want to be associated with the lapses of judgement and stylistic faults she discerned in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.

“Charlotte’s criticism of her sisters’ work, so soon after their deaths when the pain of loss was still raw, seems extraordinary,” writes Jessica. “The motivation for this is suggested by the opening of her preface, in which she alludes to the fact that, despite numerous assertions to the contrary, there remained a popular belief that Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell were one and the same person.

“Given the critical response to Wuthering Heights and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte’s tendency to take criticism of her work to heart, it is perhaps not surprising that she sought to distance herself from her sisters’ work.”

Jessica Cox’s book augments the best of earlier works on the remarkable family, offering the general reader both a summary of life at the top of Haworth from the time Charlotte was moved there at the age of four, and an analysis of the times in which she wrote her four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette.