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the subject of the
writer’s sex; but then I had the advantage over the general public of having the
handwriting of the author before me.”
    Published just six weeks later on October 16, Jane Eyre , with its declarative opening line—“There
was no possibility of taking a walk that day”—proved shocking to many
Victorians, and even an assault against decorum. Yet it was immediately
recognized as a masterpiece, and could count among its admirers Queen Victoria,
who read it aloud to her “dear Albert.” Thackeray, who’d received an early
review copy, wrote to Charlotte’s publisher:
    I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost
(or won if you like) a whole day in reading it. . . . Who the author
can be I can’t guess, if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies
do, or has had a “classical” education. . . . Some of the love
passages made me cry. . . . I don’t know why I tell you this but that
I have been exceedingly moved and pleased by Jane
Eyre. It is a woman’s writing, but whose?
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning thought it a fine novel
(and superior to the subsequent Shirley and Villette ) but wrote to a friend, “I certainly don’t
think that the qualities, half savage and half freethinking, expressed in Jane Eyre are likely to suit a model governess or
schoolmistress.” Although she found these “qualities” repugnant and expressed
her disapproval, she was excited by the mystery of the authorship—particularly
the scandalous gossip that “Currer Bell” was actually a young governess. Another
critic declared that the novel was “[w]orth fifty Trollopes and Martineaus
rolled into one counterpane, with fifty Dickenses and Bulwers to keep them
company,” but added that the author of Jane Eyre was
“rather a brazen Miss.”
    Compared with her sisters’ novels, Charlotte’s
debut achieved by far the greatest commercial and critical success. Sales
exceeded all expectations, and within six months Jane
Eyre went into a third printing. Charlotte—or, rather, her nom de
plume—became the most celebrated author in England. Deepening the mystery was
the book’s curious title page: “ Jane Eyre: An
Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell.” It had been George Smith’s
idea to add the provocative subtitle. The novel was very autobiographical
indeed—for Charlotte, that is. Some critics believed that Bell was a woman, but
to others it seemed obvious that the novel was simply too good to have been
written by a female author. “It is no woman’s writing,” wrote one reviewer
confidently. “Although ladies have written histories, and travels, and warlike
novels, to say nothing of books upon the different arts and sciences, no woman could have penned the ‘Autobiography of Jane
Eyre.’ It is all that one of the other sex might invent, and much more.” The
critic George Henry Lewes wrote that the novel was perhaps not autobiographical
“in the naked facts and circumstances,” but it certainly appeared to be “in the
actual suffering and experience.”
    Some speculated that perhaps Acton and Currer Bell
were the same person. A baffled critic surmised that the author’s identity was
divided, “if we are not misinformed, with a brother and sister. The work bears
the marks of more than one mind and more than one sex.” One writer argued that
the novel’s “mistakes” about “preparing game and dessert dishes” proved beyond a
doubt that the author was a man, because no female author would have been so
clueless. But another claimed that “only a woman or an upholsterer” could have
written the section about sewing on brass rings. Yet another reviewer was
convinced that the name was a pseudonym, perhaps an anagram, and that the book
was definitely by a woman from