Charlotte Bronte’s Life & Work Limned at Morgan Library

By MARK SULEYMANOV

Dark family portraits, old paint boxes, and dusty manuscripts were among the artifacts on display as The Morgan Library and Museum debuted an exhibit for 19th-century English novelist Charlotte Brontë, best known for authoring Jane Eyre.

Open to the press a day early on Thursday, the exhibit, entitled Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, displayed a litany of artifacts from Brontë’s life; ranging from miniature manuscripts bound in leather and notebooks to her adolescence drawings, clothes she wore in the last few years of her life and an original manuscript of Jane Eyre.

“These are the material traces of her life and writing, the things she created,” said Christine Nelson, the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the library who is in charge of all the artifacts on display. “It’s almost as if she’s standing here as we are about to scrutinize her life.”

Entering the exhibit on the second floor of the museum, a glass display containing a two-piece printed delaine dress (of cotton and wool), which she is believed to have acquired around 1850 in London, is front and center. Accompanying the dress is a pair of brown cloth ankle boots with leather toe caps. Nelson noted that the dress has been altered several times following Brontë’s death as it was passed down to several relatives.

However, before the fancy dresses and like items that her talent provided, Brontë toiled away as a governess in West Yorkshire, England. before realizing she wanted more from life.

A daughter of Yorkshire clergyman Patrick Brontë, who outlived his wife and six kids, Charlotte’s passion for being an artist is evident from the drawings, letters, and poems scattered around the room. Her love for language began when she was young, reading authors such as Bunyan, Milton, Scott, Aesop, Byron, with her living siblings Branwell, Emily, and Anne. Bronte’s desire to illustrate was obvious from the various drawings from her teenage years at the Roe Head school in the early 1830s.

However, as the exhibit explains, she decided to give up being a governess – believing she could not thrive at that either. At 30 years old, she collaborated with her sisters Emily and Anne to self-publish a book of poems. For a year after that book, Brontë shopped around ideas, and was rejected at all turns before George Smith decided to publish her, resulting in Jane Eyre.

Manuscripts of the four novels Brontë completed before her death are aligned, including The Professor, her first piece of work, which was published posthumously.

“Her sheer ambition and the steps she took to move forward as an artist reflect her strong will,” Nelson said. “Things like writing to famous poets, sending them her work when she’s an unknown author in West Yorkshire, writing to the poet Robert Southey, telling him ‘I want to be forever known.’ [as an author].”

Over 200 years later, her work still has a profound impact on not just writers but women who want to make a life for themselves in their desired field.

“Imagine a woman who was introverted, had a towering talent, suddenly facing a life that was not a good fit for her,” Nelson said of Bronte wanting to follow her dream.

With several marriage licenses present on display, Bronte’s hard work led to deteriorating health and her death at age 39 on March 31, 1855 – just nine months after marrying Arthur Bell Nicholls. However, as Nelson puts it, the same people who once said the author of Jane Eyre – whose identity they were unsure of as Bronte published under her alias Currer Bell – had to be a “woman unsexed,” are wrong two centuries later.

Bronte’s work was a pivotal catalyst to showing that men and women were on an equal platform.

“To you, I am not a woman, I am not a man, I am an author,” said Nelson of Bronte’s most influential quotes.

The exhibit opens to the public starting Friday and was scheduled to run through January 2.

Photo of Charlotte Bronte’s dress by Mark Suleymanov