Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell: The Brontës and the Names They Hid Behind

In 1846, a slim volume of poems appeared in London under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It sold, by most accounts, two copies.

The Bells were Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, three sisters living in a parsonage in Haworth, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. The initials matched their own. The surname did not, and the first names were chosen precisely because a reader could not tell what they were — not obviously male, but certainly not female.

Why not their own names

Charlotte explained it later, and her explanation is worth quoting in spirit if not in full: they had a vague impression that women who wrote were looked on with prejudice, that critics used the author's sex as a weapon, praising with condescension or attacking with a personal edge. So they chose names that gave nothing away.

She was right to worry. When Jane Eyre became a sensation in 1847 and rumours spread that "Currer Bell" might be a woman, a section of the criticism curdled immediately — the book was suddenly coarse, unfeminine, improper.

The extraordinary year

What happened next is one of the odder facts in literary history. Within roughly a year, the same household produced Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily) and Agnes Grey (Anne). Anne followed it with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848 — a novel about a woman fleeing an alcoholic husband, which was frank enough that Charlotte later tried to keep it out of print.

These are not three versions of the same book. Jane Eyre is a first-person account of a governess who refuses to be diminished. Wuthering Heights is a violent, structurally strange, almost pitiless novel that readers still argue about. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is closer to social realism, and angrier than either.

The short ending

Emily died in 1848, Anne in 1849. Charlotte outlived them both, published under her own name at last, and died in 1855. The whole body of work — the poems, the four major novels — was written and finished in under a decade by three women in their twenties and thirties who had almost no expectation of being read.

The pen names were a defence against a world that would not take them seriously. The novels turned out not to need the protection.