The New York Public Library
Collector's Editions

JANE EYRE

by Charlotte Brontë

574 pages, 5 1/4 X 7 1/4,
ISBN 0-385-48717-7, $18.50

Published by Doubleday

This engraved portrait of Charlotte Brontë, after an original painting by Alonzo Chappel, was printed in New York in the early 1870s. Many who met Brontë were amazed to find that the fierce and vehement Currer Bell was, in fact, a rather plain, terribly shy, and quite proper woman, completely unremarkable in appearance except for eyes of "extraordinary brilliancy and penetration." One young writer who dined at the Parsonage was mesmerized by them: "they looked you through and through -- and you felt they were forming an opinion of you . . . by a subtle penetration into the very marrow of your mind, and the innermost core of your soul!"

Reproduction Information

A sampling of text and images from the Collector's Edition of Jane Eyre

ABOUT THIS EDITION

The objects and illustrations that adorn this Collector's Edition of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (a selection from which are included here) are all drawn from the collections of The New York Public Library. The treasures of the Library's special collections spend most of their lives locked away in temperature-controlled vaults. But in this edition, the doors swing open and the reader can delight in some of the rarities that have made The New York Public Library a mecca for scholars and lovers of literature from around the world. Here, for example, one can study Brontë's graceful hand, while admiring the vigor of her prose; and one can accompany the young Virginia Woolf on her excursion to a snowbound Haworth in the winter of 1904. All the manuscripts and objects reproduced here bring Charlotte Brontë and her world to life with an immediacy and a poignancy that can take the breath away.

Original handwritten materials

Charlotte Brontë's autograph letter of January 28, 1848, to W. S. Williams.

This letter from Brontë to W. S. Williams, her publisher's reader, was provoked by an earlier one from William Makepeace Thackeray to the same correspondent. "I wish," he wrote Williams on October 23, 1847, "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 . . ." He thought "the man & woman capital" and, as he told Williams, he had astonished the butler when, bringing in the coals, the poor man found his master crying over some of the novel's love passages. With his wholly characteristic kindness, Williams sent extracts of Thackeray's letter to Brontë, who was so gratified by the great satirist's approbation that she dedicated the second (1848) edition of Jane Eyre to the man she considered a "Titan of the mind" and an "intellectual boa-constrictor."

Thackeray -- whose fame was growing meteorically as his great novel Vanity Fair continued its serialization in 1847-48 -- pronounced the dedication "the greatest compliment I have ever received in my life." But Brontë could not have foreseen that her tribute would actually cause her hero some embarrassment. She was dismayed when she learned that Thackeray's wife -- like Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre -- had gone mad, and that, in the wake of her dedication, ridiculous rumors were buzzing around London that "Currer Bell" had once served as a governess in the Thackeray household. "Well may it be said that Fact is often stranger than Fiction!" she exclaimed to Williams in the famous letter reproduced here, which she closes with a strangely self-effacing declaration that

. . . not one feeling, on any subject -- public or private, will I ever affect that I do not really experience -- yet though I must limit my sympathies -- though my observation cannot penetrate where the very deepest political and social truths are to be learnt . . . I mean still, in my own contracted way to do my best. Imperfect my best will be, and poor . . . but I trust not affected or counterfeit.

Virginia Woolf's "Haworth, November, 1904."

Soon after the death of his daughter Charlotte in 1855, the Reverend Patrick Brontë found himself slicing up her letters into thin strips which he gave to the enthusiasts who had begun to besiege Haworth Parsonage. Just about fifty years later, in her essay "Haworth, November, 1904," Virginia Woolf attempted to come to grips with what now might be called Brontë Fever. First published in the Guardian of December 21, 1904, this essay marked Woolf's second appearance in print.

Editions

The W. T. H. Howe copy of the second edition of Jane Eyre.

Great libraries become great through the largesse of private donors. The private library of the ardent bibliophile W. T. H. Howe is one of the more astonishing collections to have been presented to the Library during its first century. Howe's treasures were absorbed into The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature -- one of the grand "libraries within the Library."

Many of the rare editions in the Library's special collections, like the Berg, have valuable manuscripts "tipped" (i.e., lightly pasted) into them, and researchers are sometimes pleasantly startled, as they open one of these volumes, to come upon a letter in the hand of an illustrious writer. The Howe copy of Jane Eyre is one such edition, for Brontë's important letter to W. S. Williams (above), in which she discusses the Thackeray imbroglio, has come to rest between the covers of the first of its three volumes.

In addition to Brontë's letter, another sheet has been added to this volume, and it gives an idea of some of the difficulties of that all-consuming passion, book collecting. On light lavender paper, the writer -- most probably W. T. H. Howe himself -- seems to have decided to purchase this copy of Jane Eyre, but he has a complaint about one of its previous owners: "I don't suppose I shall get a better copy of this important edition . . . & as to the nature of the marks in (esp.) I & II . . .: they do not look like fungus, but more as if Miss de Blouay always ate tartines de beurre & pâtisserie while she read."

Ethel Gabain's original illustrations for an edition of Jane Eyre, printed in Paris by Léon Pichon in 1923.

Jane surrounded by the great moors.

Commissioned by a prominent French collector, this splendid edition was limited to only 495 copies, of which nos. 1-15 (the Library's is no. 5) were printed with seventeen original lithographs by the English artist Ethel Gabain (1883-1950). One of the few women of her generation to be able to make a living as a lithographer, Gabain and her husband, the well-known English printmaker John Copley, lived for some years in Italy, where both were inspired to do some of their finest work. Fluid and beautifully executed, Gabain's lithographs have a distinctive cachet that some critics attributed to her Gallic blood (she was half French).

This handsome edition -- part of the Library's collection of prints and illustrated books -- attests to the tremendous vogue which the Brontës have enjoyed in France ever since the day, in October 1848, when Eugène Forçade declared in the Revue des Deux Mondes: "I shall never cease to praise . . . the vigorous, healthy, moral spirit that informs every page of Jane Eyre. Whatever our novelists may say, this book proves once more that there are infinite resources for fiction in the depiction of upright morals and straightforward events of real life and the simple and open development of passions."

Artifacts

A slip of wallpaper inscribed on the back by Mrs. Gaskell.

Slip of wallpaper and (below) Mrs. Gaskell's note on the back.

Having overcome her father's objections and her own doubts, Brontë had finally agreed, in the spring of 1854, to marry Arthur Bell Nicholls. She wrote to her dearest friend, Ellen Nussey, in early April:

What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order. I trust to love my husband -- I am grateful for his tender love to me -- I believe him to be an affectionate -- a conscientious -- a high-principled man -- and if with all this, I should yield to regrets -- that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts are not added -- it seems to me I should be most presumptuous and thankless.

During a visit to Elizabeth Gaskell's home at Plymouth Grove, Manchester, in early May, Brontë talked to her friend (and future biographer) about the preparations for her upcoming wedding. These -- which "could neither be expensive nor extensive" -- consisted "chiefly in a modest replenishing of her wardrobe, some repapering and repainting in the parsonage; and, above all, converting the small flagged passage room . . . into a study for her husband." This last was most important, for her concern, according to Mrs. Gaskell, was all for the comfort of her husband, as well as for the father whose "convenience and seclusion" at the Parsonage -- she had promised -- would remain "scrupulously respected" after her marriage. At the end of May, five weeks before the wedding, Brontë informed Ellen that "the little new room is got into order, and the green and white curtains are up; they exactly suit the paper . . ." This little slip is a remnant of the wallpaper with which this "so dutiful a daughter" redecorated her future husband's study. It is not known exactly when or why Mrs. Gaskell acquired the little slip of Mr. Nicholls's wallpaper. She may have gathered it while researching her biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, which she published in 1857.

Charlotte Brontë's portable escritoire.

This beautiful traveling desk is one of three owned by the Berg Collection. It shares a display case in the Berg's reading room with the desks that once accompanied Thackeray and William Cullen Bryant. The curators of the Berg Collection are very careful not to close up Brontë's desk: once locked, it is quite adamant about staying locked.

The ambrotype portrait of the Rev. Patrick Brontë found in his daughter Charlotte's portable escritoire.
Patrick Brontë was surely one of the few clerics in nineteenth-century England to allow his children the run of his library, not excluding his numerous editions of that great corrupter of youth, George Gordon, Lord Byron. He knew Milton by heart, and was himself the author of several volumes of verse. Mrs. Gaskell's great biography of Charlotte gave him to the world, not without some justification, as quite the eccentric. But perhaps he was merely distracted. When Charlotte determined it was time to inform her father that she was Currer Bell, the celebrated author of Jane Eyre, she took a deep breath and "marched into his study":

"Papa I've been writing a book."
"Have you my dear?" -- and he went on reading.
"But Papa I want you to look at it."
"I can't be troubled to read manuscript."
"But it is printed."
"I hope you have not been involving yourself in any such silly expense."
"I think I shall gain some money by it. May I read you some reviews?"

Charlotte read the notices, and left her father with a copy of the novel which, it appeared, he might look over. Later that day he invited Charlotte, Emily, and Anne to tea. "Children," he announced, "Charlotte has been writing a book -- and I think it is a better one than I expected."

An ambrotype is an early kind of photograph in which a glass negative is backed by a dark surface so as to appear positive. The word is from the Greek: ambrotos -- which means immortal.

Late in 1836, Charlotte Brontë sent a letter (a "crude rhapsody" she would later call it) with some of her poems to one of the great men of the day, Robert Southey, Poet Laureate since 1813. His reply acknowledged that she possessed ("& in no inconsiderable degree") the faculty of verse. But he went on to tell her bluntly: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation." Almost 150 years after Charlotte Brontë's death, these treasures from The New York Public Library continue to enchant and amaze. One is reminded that Haworth was at one time a very obscure parish, and Southey looks rather the fool. But then, he could not have known that "C. Brontë" would one day write Jane Eyre.