I

A Portfolio of Beginnings

Thirty-two years before Jane Eyre, in Highbury, another portfolio is opened, this time in front of a suitor. Emma Woodhouse has decided to take Harriet Smith’s likeness, and when Mr. Elton praises her drawings, she thinks: “You know nothing of drawing. Don’t pretend to be in raptures about mine. Keep your raptures for Harriet’s face.” The raptures, Emma will learn, were for her. Then she “produced the portfolio containing her various attempts at portraits, for not one of them had ever been finished.” Austen lists them, “Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours had been all tried in turn,” and gives the verdict in five words: “steadiness had always been wanting.”

Emma settles on “a whole-length in water-colours, like Mr. John Knightley’s,” destined, “if she could please herself, to hold a very honourable station over the mantelpiece,” and she means “to give a little more height, and considerably more elegance.” As the picture goes forward, each man looks for something of his own. Mr. Knightley: “You have made her too tall, Emma.” Emma “knew that she had, but would not own it.” Mr. Elton: “Oh no! certainly not too tall; not in the least too tall.” Mr. Woodhouse’s one objection is the little shawl: “it makes one think she must catch cold.”

The frame must come from London. Mr. Elton carries the picture there to “chuse the frame, and give the directions,” and it comes back “elegantly framed,” to hang “over the mantelpiece of the common sitting-room.”

That is what a lady’s picture was for: made to be seen, praised by a suitor, framed in town, hung where the household sits. It was all front. Jane has one picture that was framed and hung. Before she leaves Lowood, Bessie, the nurse from her Gateshead childhood, comes to see her and asks the two things Rochester will test: can she play the piano, and can she draw? Jane points to a watercolor landscape over the chimney-piece, a present to the superintendent, who had it “framed and glazed.” “It is as fine a picture as any Miss Reed’s drawing-master could paint,” Bessie says. The three in her portfolio are the reverse at every point. Her pictures are finished. They are judged, not flattered. Nobody frames them. And the man who judges them looks at his watch and tells her to take Adèle to bed.

II

The Copies

Around 1829 Patrick Brontë engaged John Bradley of Keighley, a house and sign painter, to teach all four of his children to draw. What Charlotte learned, as the Morgan Library put it when it showed her drawings in 2016, was “to copy from prints rather than sketch from nature.”

She was good at it, and she looked harder than anyone around her. Mary Taylor, who was at school with her at Roe Head, told Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s first biographer, that “She used to draw much better, and more quickly, than anything we had seen before,” and that “Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her ‘what she saw in it.’”

The two drawings she sent to Leeds were “Bolton Abbey” and “Kirkstall Abbey.” She had copied the first in May 1834 from Edward Finden’s engraving in The Literary Souvenir. A copy of an engraving of a Turner, exhibited for sale.

The next March she copied a print after Fuseli’s Lycidas in watercolor, and this time she didn’t obey it. The figure, “decidedly male in Fuseli’s version,” the Morgan noted, “is more ambiguous in her rendering,” and, having only the black-and-white print, she invented the color.

“At one time,” Gaskell writes, “Charlotte had the notion of making her living as an artist, and wearied her eyes in drawing,” minutely but, in Gaskell’s judgment, without accuracy, “for she drew from fancy rather than from nature.” Gaskell means invention. Of the sisters she says, “they laboured to design imaginations of their own; they lacked the power of execution, not of conception.” By the Christmas of 1836 the plan was over: “She had once hoped that she herself might become an artist, and so earn her livelihood; but her eyes had failed her in the minute and useless labour which she had imposed upon herself with a view to this end.” In one letter Gaskell prints, Charlotte apologizes for its brevity, “for I have been drawing all day, and my eyes are so tired it is quite a labour to write.”

The lessons had been the same for all four children. What they were for was not the same for a girl and a boy. In a girl’s education, drawing was supposed, in Alexander’s summary, “to act as an embellishment and an amusement.” Of the boy, Gaskell writes, “they all thought there could be no doubt about Branwell’s talent for drawing.” His family, she writes, “augured truly” that “he might turn out a great painter,” and “the best way of preparing him to become so appeared to be to send him as a pupil to the Royal Academy.”

So what went to Leeds were copies, and the fancy went into the margins of her manuscripts and into the stories. The novel does the reverse with Jane’s work: her fancy goes into pictures, and the pictures stay in the portfolio.

III

Out of My Head

Back at Thornfield, Rochester’s next question is about the head. “That head I see now on your shoulders?” “Yes, sir.” “Has it other furniture of the same kind within?” “I should think it may have: I should hope—better.”

While he looks, Jane turns to the reader and disowns the pictures before she describes them. “I must premise that they are nothing wonderful … As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.” Fancy was Gaskell’s word for Charlotte. Here it is Jane’s, for what her hand could not reach.

“These pictures were in water-colours.” The first shows “clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea,” and a half-submerged mast, on which sits “a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems.” Below, “a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.” The second is a hilltop under a twilight sky, and rising into it “a woman’s shape to the bust.” “The dim forehead was crowned with a star”: it is “this vision of the Evening Star.” The third shows “the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky,” and against it “a colossal head,” veiled below the eyes, with “an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair.” Above the temples is “a ring of white flame,” and of that ring she writes: “This pale crescent was ‘the likeness of a kingly crown;’ what it diademed was ‘the shape which shape had none.’”

The inner quotation marks are Brontë’s, because the words are Milton’s. In the second book of Paradise Lost, at the gate of Hell, Satan meets Death: “The other Shape— / If shape it might be called that shape had none … what seemed his head / The likeness of a kingly crown had on.” Jane describes her third picture in Milton’s words for Death.

The wreck and the ice came from nearer home. On the first pages of the novel, the ten-year-old Jane sits in a window-seat behind a red curtain with Bewick’s History of British Birds. The rock “standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray” and “a wreck just sinking” are its vignettes, small wood engravings; the Arctic is its letterpress, which she quotes, “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone,” and then calls “death-white realms.” Eight years later the wreck and the ice are in her portfolio, remembered, not copied. Rochester asked where she got her copies. Part of the answer is that the head was already furnished.

The critic Barbara Gates reads the three as “presentiments of trials that are to come,” and Peter Bolt, writing in The Victorian Web, traces them to scripture and Greek legend. What the novel itself does with them is simpler: it never shows anyone but Rochester looking at them.

“Were you happy when you painted these pictures?” he asks. “I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.” He presses: “And you felt self-satisfied with the result of your ardent labours?” “Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise.” Birrell’s phrase for what matters in Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, is “the quality of her devotion.” Jane has the devotion. She will not take it as consolation.

Then he gives his verdict, and it is a painter’s. “Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more, probably. You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to give it full being: yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish. These eyes in the Evening Star you must have seen in a dream. How could you make them look so clear, and yet not at all brilliant? for the planet above quells their rays. And what meaning is that in their solemn depth? And who taught you to paint wind? There is a high gale in that sky, and on this hill-top. Where did you see Latmos? For that is Latmos.” Latmos is the mountain where the moon came down to the sleeping Endymion. Jane never names it. As Bolt notes, he does.

Then: “There! put the drawings away!”

IV

The Backs of Drawings

Jane passes sentence on herself in two pictures: a chalk self-portrait, to be titled “Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain,” and, on ivory, the beauty she supposes Rochester will court, “Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank,” for which she is to “omit neither diamond ring nor gold bracelet.” Peter Bolt links that bracelet to the one in the cormorant’s beak.

At Gateshead she draws “fancy vignettes,” a naiad and “an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow’s nest,” and then, feature by feature, a face: “I was absorbed and content.” Her cousin Eliza asks whether it is a portrait of someone she knows. “I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester.” Fancy, which was the word for what her hand could not reach, is here the word she lies with.

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë gives her heroine, Helen, a secret of the same kind, and a man who goes looking for it. In the diary she keeps before her marriage, Helen describes looking up at a party to see Huntingdon “complacently gazing at the back of the picture:—it was his own face that I had sketched there and forgotten to rub out!” He holds the rest to a candle, “I must look at both sides now,” and makes out the faint traces of her other attempts at his face. “I perceive the backs of young ladies’ drawings,” he says, “like the postscripts of their letters, are the most important and interesting part of the concern.”

The next morning he finds her in the library, finishing what she calls “my masterpiece”: a girl kneeling under a bough to watch “an amorous pair of turtle doves.” He “set himself before my picture.” “She’s a sweet creature! but why didn’t you make her black hair?” Helen’s own hair is black. “I should fall in love with her,” he says, “if I hadn’t the artist before me.” Then he takes up her portfolio. “Mr. Huntingdon, those are my unfinished sketches,” she cries, “and I never let any one see them.” “Let me have its bowels then,” he says, and pockets a miniature of himself. When he gives it back: “To show him how I valued it, I tore it in two and threw it into the fire.”

Two heroines draw the face of the man each will marry. Jane lies about hers. Helen burns hers. In both novels the drawing that tells the truth is on the side that wasn’t meant to be seen.

V

Some Other Hand

When Gilbert Markham, the neighbor who narrates the novel, calls at Wildfell Hall, he is shown into a studio. The tenant is Helen, who has left her husband, Huntingdon, and is living under the name Mrs. Graham. There is “a painter’s easel,” and “rolls of canvas, bottles of oil and varnish.” On the easel is a view of Wildfell Hall itself, lettered “Fernley Manor, Cumberland.” She has given the place a false name, she tells him, because friends “might possibly recognise the style in spite of the false initials” she has put in the corner. Will she keep it? “No; I cannot afford to paint for my own amusement.” Her small son explains: “Mamma sends all her pictures to London.”

She had planned, before she fled, to live by her painting: “The palette and the easel, my darling playmates once, must be my sober toil-fellows now.” Her husband found the materials and fed them to the fire: “palette, paints, bladders, pencils, brushes, varnish: I saw them all consumed.”

In the same letter, dated 11 March 1848, in which she turned down the illustrations, she told Williams: “It is not enough to have the artist’s eye; one must also have the artist’s hand to turn the first gift to practical account … when I examine the contents of my portfolio now, it seems as if during the years it has been lying closed, some fairy had changed what I once thought sterling coin into dry leaves, and I feel much inclined to consign the whole collection of drawings to the fire; I see they have no value.” Rochester had told Jane that she “had not enough of the artist’s skill and science.”

Both sisters, writing in the same house, set a woman’s pictures beside a fire. Anne did it twice: in one chapter the woman burns her own picture, and in another her husband burns her materials. Charlotte did it once, of herself, in a letter, and was only “inclined.”

Charlotte, Emily and Anne had published as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. That July, word reached Smith, Elder that Emily and Anne’s publisher, Thomas Newby, had told an American house that the Bell novels, Anne’s new one among them, were all “the production of one author”: that Currer Bell was also Ellis and Acton. Charlotte and Anne took the night train to London “with the view of proving our separate identity.” Charlotte’s publisher, George Smith, had never seen her. She told Mary Taylor what happened at Smith, Elder: “‘Is it Mr. Smith?’ I said, looking up through my spectacles at a tall young man.” She “put his own letter into his hand,” a letter he had written to Currer Bell. “Where did you get this?” he asked. “I gave my real name: Miss Brontë.” On the Monday, “we went to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy and the National Gallery.”

The last man in Jane Eyre to look at one of Jane’s pictures is St. John Rivers, the clergyman who has taken her in. She has painted a miniature of Rosamond Oliver, the local heiress he loves. He praises the workmanship, “A well-executed picture … very soft, clear colouring; very graceful and correct drawing,” but asks, unlike Rochester, nothing about how it was made, and looks in it for Rosamond: “It is like! … the eye is well managed: the colour, light, expression, are perfect. It smiles!” Then he covers it with “the sheet of thin paper on which I was accustomed to rest my hand in painting,” and tears “a narrow slip from the margin.” The next day it comes out of his pocket-book, with its “stains of ultra-marine, and lake, and vermillion,” bearing, “in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words ‘JANE EYRE’—the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction.” She has called herself Jane Elliott since the night she reached Moor House. The slip proves she is Jane Eyre: heir to an uncle’s twenty thousand pounds, and St. John’s cousin. Of everything Jane paints, the one piece that leaves the room and changes her life is the scrap she rested her hand on, and what is written on it is her name.