Charlotte Bronte Was Told Writing Isn't for Women
Quick answer: In 1837 the Poet Laureate told Charlotte Bronte that literature was no business for a woman. Ten years later Jane Eyre made her pen name Currer Bell famous.
In the winter of 1836 a twenty year old teacher at a Yorkshire boarding school did something brave and slightly reckless: she wrote to the Poet Laureate of England, Robert Southey, enclosing her poems and asking, in effect, whether she should build her life on writing. Charlotte Bronte was working at Roe Head school, homesick and overworked, scribbling in every stolen minute. Southey was one of the most established literary men alive. His reply arrived in March 1837, and it has become one of the most infamous letters in literary history.
He told her that literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. He was not being casually cruel; by the standards of his time he thought he was being kind, and he did allow that she wrote, in his phrase, the faculty of verse. It hardly softens the moment. A young woman had asked the profession's highest authority for a door, and he had, politely and firmly, pointed her back to the kitchen.
What Southey Actually Said
The letter deserves to be read precisely, because it is subtler and therefore more instructive than the caricature. Southey warned Charlotte against daydreams, which he thought bred distaste for ordinary life. Then came the sentence that history remembers: literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she was engaged in her proper duties, he went on, the less leisure she would have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation. Write poetry for its own sake, he advised, but not with a view to celebrity.
Notice the mechanism, because versions of it still operate. The gatekeeper does not say the work is bad. He says the ambition is inappropriate for the person holding it. That species of discouragement, aimed at the writer rather than the writing, is the hardest kind to answer, because there is nothing to revise.
Her Reply, and the Note on the Envelope
Charlotte wrote back a letter of almost painful humility, thanking him and promising to attend to her duties, teaching, sewing, the whole catalogue, and to write only in spare moments. Southey answered again, kindly enough, and there the correspondence ended. On the surface, the establishment had won: the young woman had accepted her place.
But she kept the letter all her life, and she wrote a sentence on it that tells you everything about how defiance can wear the costume of obedience. Southey's advice, the note reads, to be kept for ever, dated on her twenty first birthday at Roe Head in April 1837. She did keep it, and she kept writing. Whatever she said in her reply, the evidence of the next twenty years is that she treated the Laureate's verdict as a thing to be outlasted rather than obeyed.
Ten Years of No
The decade that followed offered little encouragement of any other kind. Charlotte worked as a teacher and governess, jobs she largely hated. In 1846 she and her sisters paid to publish Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell under pseudonyms chosen, as she later explained, because they suspected that women writers were judged with prejudice. The book is widely reported to have sold two copies. Undeterred in the way only the truly cornered can be, each sister then wrote a novel.
Charlotte's was The Professor, and publisher after publisher turned it down; it would not appear in print until after her death. The rejection that mattered, though, came from the London firm of Smith, Elder and Co., because it came with a paragraph of explanation. The Professor was declined, but the letter discussed its merits so carefully, and added that a longer, more gripping novel would receive close attention, that Charlotte later said she read that refusal with more pleasure than she would have read an acceptance. She had, as it happened, such a novel already under way.
Six Weeks to Print
She sent Jane Eyre to Smith, Elder in August 1847. The firm's reader championed it; the young publisher George Smith reportedly began it one morning and could not stop until he had finished. The house moved with astonishing speed, and the novel was published on 16 October 1847, roughly six weeks after the manuscript arrived, under the name Currer Bell.
It was an immediate sensation. Thackeray, then at the height of his fame, praised it warmly; London argued about who Currer Bell might be, and whether the author could possibly be a woman. Within months, the governess whom the Poet Laureate had steered away from literature had written the most talked about novel in England. When Charlotte finally revealed herself to her publishers in 1848, walking into their office with her sister Anne, George Smith found it hard to believe that this tiny, shy woman was the author the whole country was discussing.
What Was Defiance and What Was Craft
It would be tidy to say Charlotte triumphed by ignoring Southey, but the record is more interesting. She partly took his advice: she stopped aiming at poetry, the form she had sent him, and her eventual breakthrough came in prose, a form she had been practising since childhood in the miniature magazines and sagas she wrote with her brother Branwell about the imaginary kingdom of Angria. Decades of private, unpublished storytelling were sitting behind Jane Eyre's assurance. The apprenticeship was invisible, but it was real, and it was long.
The other half of the story is stamina in the face of specific, repeated rejection: two copies sold, a novel refused everywhere, a brother collapsing into addiction at home, and behind it all the Laureate's letter in a drawer. What Charlotte did with discouragement was neither swallow it nor rage at it. She filed it, annotated it, and used it as fuel. Writers still receive Southey letters, from teachers, relatives and the occasional editor. The Bronte protocol remains sound: reply politely, keep the letter, keep writing.
Reading Her With a Writer's Eye
Jane Eyre remains the essential text, and for a working writer its first chapters are a masterclass in voice: a narrator who claims your loyalty within two pages by the sheer authority of her grievance. Villette, her last completed novel, is the connoisseur's choice, darker and formally stranger, built out of her lonely years studying in Brussels. The 1846 Poems are worth an hour too, if only to stand in the ruins of the book that sold two copies and feel how little first sales predict.
Her letters may be the most useful reading of all. They document, week by week, what it costs to keep a talent alive in unpromising circumstances, and they prove the cost is payable. If you have a manuscript making the rounds and a collection of polite refusals, you are not off the path; you are on the most heavily used stretch of it. Sending work somewhere it will actually be read and answered, as every entry to Writory's monthly contest is, beats leaving it to wait for permission that never comes.
What poets can take from this
- When discouragement targets you rather than your work, treat it as having no revision value and carry on.
- Keep your rejection letters; a file of them is a record of activity, and occasionally, as with Charlotte's, a trophy in waiting.
- Read encouraging rejections closely; the Smith, Elder letter shows an editor's no can contain a map to yes.
- If one form keeps refusing you, try your material in another; Charlotte's poems were declined but her prose conquered.
- Build a private body of work without waiting for publication; her Angria sagas trained the hand that wrote Jane Eyre.
- Answer gatekeepers politely and then let your output, not your correspondence, make the argument.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the form of a reply to someone who once told you what you could not be. Keep the tone courteous and let the defiance live entirely in the images.
Questions
What did Robert Southey say to Charlotte Bronte?
In a letter of March 1837 he told her that literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and ought not to be, advising her to write only as a private recreation. He conceded she had a talent for verse, but warned her against pursuing celebrity.
How many publishers rejected Charlotte Bronte?
Her first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publisher after publisher and never printed in her lifetime. One refusal, from Smith, Elder and Co., was so thoughtful and encouraging that she sent them her next manuscript, Jane Eyre, which they published within about six weeks.
Why did Charlotte Bronte use the name Currer Bell?
She and her sisters published under the ambiguous names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell because, as she later explained, they suspected that openly female authors were judged with prejudice. She revealed her identity to her publishers in 1848, after Jane Eyre had already succeeded.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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