Elena Ferrante is in good company among women novelists hiding their identities
By N.M. | NEW YORK
TWENTY years ago, the mysterious Italian author of the acclaimed Neapolitan quartet chose Elena Ferrante for a pen name, an homage to her literary hero Elsa Morante. Perhaps Ms Ferrante, the world’s most famous anonymous writer, is also aware that her pseudonym is an aural echo of another name stamped with genius and a craving for anonymity: Brontë.
Closeted in a remote Yorkshire parsonage on the moor Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë battled tuberculosis, family deaths, financial pressures, an aloof father and an alcoholic brother to write novels of incandescent power. That these women chose to write under false names—Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell to match their initials—was scarcely singular.
At the time, it would have been considered unseemly for a parson’s spinster daughters to write novels about vengeful love (“Wuthering Heights”), adultery and insanity (“Jane Eyre”), and alcoholism and broken marriages (“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”). And when the reviews arrived, the sisters would have been grateful for their mask. Emily and Anne’s novels were savaged as “vulgar”, “brutalising”, and “pernicious”. “Jane Eyre” was richly praised by publications including The Economist, which said of Currer Bell's book that
of all the novels we have read for years this is the most striking, and we may add, the most interesting. Its style as well as its characters are unhackneyed, perfectly fresh and lifelike, and the whole is as far removed from the namby pamby stuff of which fashionable novels are made, as from the cold, unnatural, and often disgusting productions of the French press.
We did, however, note a certain "coarseness" to the book—a "venial" flaw, commonly mentioned by other reviewers, who thought it nonetheless "honourable". They would almost certainly have read it differently knowing that it was written by a Charlotte and not a Currer.
The Brontës’ mask was much more than a ruse to duck ridicule or vainglory. Their anonymity was liberating: it allowed their imaginations to trespass in the darkest crevices of the psyche and return with tormented monsters like Heathcliff, the Ahab of the moors, and dynamos like Miss Eyre. Their pseudonyms strengthened their moral resolve, emboldening them to speak truth to that most tyrannical seat of power: ordinary society.
Ms Ferrante’s incognito has lasted twenty years—a miracle in this day of hi-tech hacking. The Brontës’ secret, initially so airtight that even their father and brother were in the dark, lasted barely two. Their identity was revealed not in one swift stripping of the veil, but in incremental stages. The process started when Emily and Anne’s unscrupulous publisher began to put it about that Acton and Currer Bell were one person, hoping that Acton’s second novel, “Wildfell Hall”, would benefit from the best-selling “Jane Eyre”. When Currer Bell’s publisher, George Smith, wrote asking for an explanation, Currer and Acton were left with no choice but to travel to London to set the record straight.
The reaction of the dashing, 24-year-old Smith, when he learned that the two little women in quaint country gowns were the “godless” Bell Brothers, was a predictable mix of incredulity and high excitement. Equally predictable was his crushingly male verdict of Charlotte: “I believe she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful.” Smith was dying to show off the celebrity sisters, but they made him promise to keep mum. Charlotte “paid for the excitement of the interview by a thundering headache & harassing sickness.”
Enjoyable though their London whirl was, it only deepened Charlotte’s contempt for "Babylon" (her name for London) and made her even more grateful for her cover. The sisters returned home, where a furious Emily learned that Charlotte had blurted out “We are three sisters” to Smith, thus inadvertently revealing her identity as well. Of the three, it was Emily who was most obsessed with secrecy. Tragically, though, a far more profound oblivion was in store for the Brontës. Within a year of that 1848 London trip, Branwell (the brother), Emily and Anne were all dead.
A “stripped and bereaved” Charlotte was now released from her vow of secrecy to Emily. Her publishers encouraged her to step out into society. But though torn by the desire to dine with luminaries like Dickens and her hero Thackeray, the pull of penumbra was far stronger. As she wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell, the novelist who would grow to be her friend and future biographer: “Currer Bell will avow to Mrs. Gaskell that her chief reason for maintaining an incognito is the fear that if she relinquished it, strength and courage would leave her, and she should ever after shrink from writing the plain truth.”
Meanwhile, London was foaming with curiosity. The sensational question was not so much who Currer Bell was but whether he was “petticoated” (not very different from those who speculate that Ferrante is trousered). Thackeray, who cried when he read “Jane Eyre”, promptly declared it was a woman’s work, as did Harriet Martineau, another novelist, who said only a woman—or a upholsterer—could have written the scene in which rings are sewn onto new curtains. Martineau wrote to Brontë, via her publisher, addressing the envelope “Currer Bell Esqre”, but opening her letter with “Madam”.
Charlotte’s secret had begun to leak out: village gossips were suspected of opening a parcel of proofs mailed to her and locals recognised that the Lowood Institution where “charity-children” were ill-treated was modelled on the Clergy Daughters’ School that the sisters had attended. Like Ms Ferrante, Charlotte drew extensively from personal experience. Though initially annoyed that her “anchorite seclusion” had been destroyed, Charlotte couldn’t help being touched by the villagers’ pride in their parson’s daughters' grand books and amused that the local Mechanics Institute charged an outrageous fine of a shilling per day for overdue books.
Even after being outed, Charlotte insisted on the charade of separating Currer Bell from Charlotte Brontë in public, as Thackeray found out to his cost. He hosted a party for her at his house, and as he was leading her to dinner on his arm (she came up to his elbow), he addressed her as Currer Bell. “I believe there are books being published by a person named Currer Bell," she snapped back, "but the person you address is Miss Brontë—and I see no connection between the two.” After dinner she sat in a corner and refused to mingle; Thackeray fled to his club.
But Charlotte’s deepest betrayal was at the hands of George Henry Lewes, the foremost critic of the age and future partner of George Eliot. Lewes and Currer Bell had maintained a spirited correspondence until Lewes discovered who she was. In his review of “Shirley”, he crowed that the “authoress is the daughter of a clergyman!” who must learn to “sacrifice a little of her Yorkshire roughness to the demands of good taste.” Then he turned the knife, commenting on a plot line in the novel wherein a desperate young mother decides to leave her baby with a relative. “Currer Bell!” thundered Lewes. “If under your heart had ever stirred a child, if to your bosom a babe had ever been pressed…never could you have imagined such a falsehood as that!”
Stunned by the ad feminem attack, a “cold and sick” Charlotte wrote to Lewes that what had hurt her most was not his criticism, “but because, after I had said earnestly that I wished critics would judge me as an author not as a woman, you so roughly—I even thought—so cruelly handled the question of sex.” She signed off with, “Yours with a certain respect and some chagrin, Currer Bell.”
There is an ocean of contempt contained in that “certain”. It is matched only by the depth of longing in one of Charlotte Brontë’s most-quoted lines: “I think if a good fairy were to offer me the choice of a gift, I would say—grant me the power to walk invisible.” Ms Ferrante, who sings with such force and sincerity from shadow, is a worthy descendant of Currer Bell.
