Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

009. 4. Letter to Ellen Nussey, 24 January 1840, page 1

Charlotte Brontë
(1816–1855)

Letter to Ellen Nussey, dated Haworth, 24 January 1840

MA 2696.25

Henry H. Bonnell Collection, bequest of Helen Safford Bonnell, 1969

Transcription

My dear Ellen

I have given Mrs Edward Halliley her coup de grace – that is to say I have relinquished the idea of becoming an inmate of her family – I have no doubt she will be very cross with me especially as when I first declined going she pressed me to take a trial of a month – I am now therefore again adrift, without an object – I am sorry for this but something may tum up erelong.

I know not whether to encourage you in your plan of going out or not – your health seems to me the great obstacle – if you could obtain a situation like Mary Brooke you might do very well – But you could never live in an unruly, violent family of modern children such for instance as those at Blake Hall – Anne is not to return – Mrs Ingham is a placid mild woman – but as for the children it was one struggle of life-wearing

A few months after she left the Sidgwick family’s employ, Brontë wrote this letter to her friend Ellen to let her know that she had just turned down a new job offer. Susanna Halliley of Leeds, a Brontë family acquaintance, had advertised for a churchgoing young lady of “amiable disposition, and some experience, willing to make herself generally useful, and competent to teach Music, French and Drawing.” The letter, which Brontë wrote in a moment of ill humor as she contemplated an unappealing future, shows evidence of her eventual fame: there is a hole in the paper where someone (presumably Ellen, later in her life) has clipped out Brontë’s signature for an autograph seeker.