A lot of newspapers and news sites echo the story of the
correspondence that went on between Charlotte Brontë and Reverend William Carus-Wilson which will be auctioned on June 21. It nearly looks as if it all was going on now to see the way the matter is treated!
The Independent offers a little more background on the history of these letters:
"Charlotte Brontë sent it to my grandfather as a kind of apology for what she had written against the Clergy Daughters' school in Jane Eyre and gave him permission to publish it and state, if he wished, that she was the writer of it. My grandfather never published this, but kept it by him and as I told you in my last letter, it passed to my father in 1883 and then to myself." [...]
Now the hunt is on for Brontë's revised manuscript. "It really is the most tantalising mystery" said Richard Westwood-Brookes, a documents expert at auctioneers Mullock Madeley, who expects the letters to sell for up to £100 at auction in Ludlow, Shropshire, next month.
"We don't know who the collector [of Carus-Wilson's letters] was. I would imagine the collector kept the letters as provenance of the genuineness of the manuscript, but at some stage it went to someone else who didn't want the letters. "This folder has probably passed from one dealer to another and changed hands many times. I doubt whether whoever sent it to me has read the letters and nobody has made the connection."This newspaper also relays what Alan Bentley - director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum - has commented on the matter:
... since Jane Eyre was originally published under a pseudonym, it was difficult to ascertain whether Carus-Wilson knew whether Charlotte Brontë, his former pupil, was the author.
The Telegraph quotes more of what Richard Westwood-Brookes said:
"It is the most tantalising mystery. Somewhere, in somebody's attic, there may well be a manuscript of Charlotte Bronte's retracting an essential passage of Jane Eyre."There we go back to the ever-raided attics. If it was in our hands we would get every attic and cellar in the UK searched for Brontë material. However, reading all this we have some doubts whether this "manuscript" would be found - or if it ever existed. Still, it makes for entertaining news and brings Charlotte to the spotlight, which is always nice, isn't it?
Categories: In_the_News, Brontëana, Charlotte_Brontë
I'd better take a gander up at the attic...
ReplyDeleteDo! Keep us posted if you come across something interesting :P
ReplyDeleteOkay, here's a little more on the story (I commented below).
ReplyDelete... since Jane Eyre was originally published under a pseudonym, it was difficult to ascertain whether Carus-Wilson knew whether Charlotte Brontë, his former pupil, was the author.
AHA! Something's rotten in Denmark! Sounds like the grandson made the whole thing up.
Hi Mags!
ReplyDeleteMany people identified Lowood and Mr Brocklehurst with Cowan Bridge and Carus-Wilson respectively right after publication, but you are right that the school had a lot of pupils over the years and it seems nearly impossible that Carus-Wilson would single Charlotte Brontë out. He could narrow it down to the very beginnings - they moved to a more salubrious place after a few years - but that's that.
The manuscript is conveniently lost, of course. The letters have been authenticated as far as concluding who the author is, I guess, but it's impossible to know whether they tell the truth.
What makes me most suspicious is that this man was trying to raise funds for his ill child. Sounds like he was desperate for the money, and he might have been willing to resort to this kind of thing to get it.
A film anyone? :P