Once in awhile, we
discover truth is stranger than fiction. Strange as it may seem, I contend, and
science now supports my view, that Charlotte Brontë
is the sole author of all the Brontë novels, which
include those believed to be written by her sisters Emily and Anne. My findings are explored in detail in Charlotte Brontë's Thunder. Names
matter, and Charlotte’s pen names enabled her to execute her literary
deception.
In December 1847,
when Wuthering Heights debuted on the
London bookshelves, the author Ellis Bell appeared to be a relative, a brother
perhaps, of Acton Bell whose novel Agnes
Grey arrived in the shops at the same time. These two books had followed
the publication of Jane Eyre: an
Autobiography edited by Currer Bell. The public, curious at the sudden glut of
Bells, wondered if the three were brothers or perhaps sisters, and even
considered Acton and Currer ladies, and Ellis a man. They agreed no lady could
have written Wuthering Heights because
of its violent and harsh depictions. A suspicious reviewer, based on the
novels’ similarity in sensibility, suggested one author wrote all three books; she
found the books contain ‘singularly unattractive’ protagonists, and the writing
presents a coarseness and brutality that combines ‘genuine power with such
horrid taste.’[1]
The three Bell
brothers were later unmasked to be sisters and, after their deaths, the public
discovered that the sisters were Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë.
Prior to their
deaths, a highly respected Victorian literary critic Sidney Dobell deduced that
Currer (Charlotte) wrote Wuthering
Heights, Agnes Grey, and a later
Acton Bell book The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall. He had found similarities between them and Jane Eyre. Interestingly, in the second edition of Wuthering Heights issued after Emily and
Anne had died, Charlotte as Currer Bell states in her ‘Biographical Notice of
Ellis and Acton Bell’ that only one critic—Sydney Dobell— ‘discerned the real
nature of Wuthering Heights.’[2] Was
this an allusion to authorship? If ‘nature’ is defined as the identity as much
as the essential character behind the work, perhaps she was providing a hint.
In the late 1840s, the
editor who published Ellis Bell’s Wuthering
Heights, and Acton Bell’s Agnes Grey
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall had
also read a fourth Bell manuscript, one penned by Currer Bell and entitled The Professor. He rejected it for its
lack of excitement, but was privy to important information: he had viewed all
three Bell brothers’ works and, therefore, had seen the handwriting on their
manuscripts. He sent The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall to New York and told the publisher ‘he was about to publish
the next book by the author of Jane Eyre,
under her other nom de plume of Acton Bell—Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell being,
in fact, according to him, one person.’[3]
If Currer Bell was
using pseudonyms, this revelation posed a problem for the author.
I believe Charlotte Brontë denied
the one-author claim for pragmatic reasons: her Currer Bell novels were with a
different publisher, and she understood the legal complications of having two publishers.
As well, as a safeguard, if she were to predecease her sisters, they could
continue to receive royalties. Her denials seemed to end the controversy but,
if she is the sole author, was there another reason for Currer Bell to use one
or even two pseudonyms?
Virginia Woolf notes
in A Room of One’s Own that women,
like Currer Bell, needed to use pen names. The women were ‘victims of inner
strife as their writings prove.’ They ‘sought ineffectively to veil themselves
by using the name of a man’ because ‘[a]nonymity runs in their blood.’ But why
use a male pen name? Woolf states that men considered women who sought ambition
and fame to be ‘detestable,’[4] so
Currer Bell would have preferred to protect her identity from the harsh
judgment of a biased public. Or, she may have had the additional motive of
copyright discrepancies as suggested above. If Sidney Dobell was correct and
Currer Bell is the sole author of the Bell novels, how could one prove that Charlotte Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights,
Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall?
One possible
means of clarification would be the discovery of these long lost manuscripts. If the pages were in Charlotte’s handwriting,
as the early publisher stated, then readers would acknowledge her as the true
author. Unfortunately, the only
manuscripts missing from the Brontë oeuvre, coincidentally,
happen to be those penned by Ellis and Acton Bell. Without the manuscripts, however,
scholars could use the science of stylometry to determine authorship. Author attribution
or stylometry uses computer software to analyze texts, such as literary works,
to detect the distinct linguistic signature in their personal writing style.
In 2013, a confidential
informant tipped off a journalist that the author of the Harry Potter books,
J.K. Rowling is also the author of The
Cuckoo’s Calling, a novel she had written under the pseudonym of Robert
Galbraith. London’s Sunday Times
asked a linguistics professor, Patrick Juola, to confirm the journalist’s
suspicions. Juola has designed a computer program called the Java Graphical
Authorship Attribution Program or JGAAP to recognize common but subtle writing
patterns that are undetectable to readers. These include language tools such as
common words, word lengths, and pairs of adjacent words. The program compared The Cuckoo’s Calling to Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy as well as three
sample texts by three fiction authors: Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, and Val
McDermid. The results pointed to J.K. Rowling as the author and she immediately
confessed that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym.
Juola stated
that author attribution, through his program, allows a curious amateur to gain
results of novel analysis in a short time. One such amateur, writing in The New Yorker, was author Paul Collins who
used JGAAP to discover, after inputting several samples, that three pieces of
prose, previously credited to Edgar Allan Poe’s brother Henry seemed to be
Edgar’s creations.[5] Juola noted that, ‘in the event that we were
studying a long-dead author, this is the kind of thing that could and would be
argued about in the journals for decades’[6] because
the author is no longer available for comment.
Juola’s
analysis of documents ‘has been recognized by the Plagiarism Action Network as
one of the most accurate methods of authenticating authorship.’[7] His software helps in his detecting: ‘What we
are doing is the same type of judgment that experts have always done about
reading documents and figuring out something about the author—just a lot
faster, and more accurate than most.’[8] The
software tool may not be able to proclaim certainty, but can provide
statistically valid evidence that suggests a particular author could have
written the tested prose. When analyzed in conjunction with other evidence, however,
the results could produce a higher degree of probability.
For the past
several years I have been researching the Brontë novels in terms of
authorship. Several clues had pointed me in this direction, specifically
identical symbolic patterns, themes, riddles, and code in Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights. Also, to the naked eye, these two novels share recurring syntax
and diction with The Professor, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. One could argue these similarities are
the result of the three sisters living under the same roof, but when placed
beside other evidence, the probability that all three sisters wrote in such a
similar manner decreases. A scientific analysis of the novels, therefore, could
either quash or support serious consideration of my theory.
The evidence that strengthened my belief that
Charlotte wrote Wuthering Heights and
the Anne Brontë novels came from the only handwritten examples of Emily and
Anne’s prose. Emily and Anne’s Diary Papers and Birthday Papers provide a
sample of the quality of their writing. The two sisters wrote briefly about
their lives on four separate occasions in 1834, 1837, 1841, and 1845. The
prose, especially Emily’s, has challenged scholars to explain the disparity
between this writing and her brilliant novel Wuthering Heights. One biographer states, ‘the dreadful handwriting
and spelling are scarcely credible as the work of a highly intelligent
sixteen-year-old.’[9]
Margaret Drabble, the novelist, biographer, and critic
acknowledges that the authorship of Wuthering Heights is still an
unsolved riddle. Part of the problem comes from ‘how little we know of Emily,’
and that her diary papers ‘do not reveal her as a novelist.’ She adds, ‘There is
something awkward and freakish about a girl of twenty-seven playing nursery games.
The absence of the awkward in Wuthering Heights is stunning,’ so how did
Emily ‘write a solid, elegant, original, beautifully constructed and firmly
Yorkshire novel like Wuthering Heights,’ especially when her life was
known to be ‘outwardly uneventful’? Unfortunately, the ‘dearth of information’
on Emily enables the book’s authorship to ‘remain a mighty enigma,’ and elicits
efforts to solve the riddle of who really wrote this ‘work of genius.’[10]
In the existing papers, when Emily was almost
nineteen, she misspelled Charlotte’s name twice as Charolotte and
Charollote. In the following excerpt,
with errors intact, she is twenty-three: ‘It is Friday evening—near nine o’clock—wild rainy weather. I
am seated in the dining room ‘alone’—having just concluded tidying our
desk-boxes—writing this document—Papa is in the parlour. Aunt up stairs in her
room—She has been reading Blackwood’s Magazine to papa—Victoria and Adelaide
are ensconced in the peat-house—Keeper is in the Kitchen—Nero in his cage—We
are all stout and hearty as I hope is the case with Charlotte, Branwell, and
Anne, of whom the first is at John White Esq- upperwood House, Rawden The second is at Luddenden foot and the third
is I beleive at—Scarborough—enditing perhaps a paper corresponding to this.’
In July of 1845, very near the time she would have been
writing Wuthering Heights, she writes, ‘. . . We are all now at home and
likely to be there some time—Branwell went to Liverpool on ‘Tuesday’ to stay a
week. Tabby has just been teasing me to turn as formerly to— ‘pilloputate.’ [peel
a potato] Anne and I should have picked the black currants if it had been fine
and sunshiny. I must hurry off now to my turning and ironing I have plenty of
work on hands and writing and am altogether full of buisness with best wishes
for the whole House till 1848 July 30th and as much longer as may be I conclude
E.J. Brontë.’[11]
Scholars believe Emily is referring to the writing of the
Gondal saga, one of the ‘nursery games’ that she and Anne had been involved
with since childhood, but without prose examples, one can only deduce the
narrative.
In Anne’s 1845 paper, she writes, ‘. . . This is a dismal
cloudy wet evening we have had so far a
very cold wet summer—Charlotte has lately been to Hathersage in Derbyshire on a
visit of three weeks to Ellen Nussy—she is now sitting sewing in the Dining
Room Emily is ironing upstairs I am sitting in the Dining Room in the
Rocking chair before the fire with my feet on the fender Papa is in the parlour Tabby and Martha are I think in the
Kitchen Keeper and Flossy are I do not
know where little Dick is hopping in his
cage.’[12]
The two sisters show neither exceptional literary prowess
nor inventiveness, and their prose is uninspiring.
Their letter writing is also sparse. Charlotte wrote letters
that would fill three volumes, but only four of Anne’s letters have survived
and Emily’s comprise just over three hundred words. Consequently, when I downloaded
Professor Juola’s software program on stylometry, I had a limited number of
words with which to compare Emily and Anne’s prose with Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey,
and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
I studied the stylometry
guide, and followed Prof. Juola’s instructions to Paul Collins as how best to program
JGAAP. I used a sample 5,000-word text from Wuthering
Heights and compared it to a 2500-word sample of Charlotte’s novel The Professor, written in 1846 at the
time scholars believe Emily wrote Wuthering
Heights. Emily and Anne’s diaries are not ideal samples at 1700 and 1100
words respectively, but at least they are known exemplars of their writing.
I used all of
Emily’s diary/birthday papers and Anne’s 1841 and 1845 papers. I then included
three contemporary authors as detractors: 5,000 word samples from Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey; Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford, and Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook. I selected words, word stems,
and n-grams for parts of speech, characters, and words, and used a Most Common
Events culler, Centroid driver function, and Cosine, Histogram, and Manhattan
functions. I asked the program to process the information and waited for the
results of the fifteen outcomes.
I repeated the
exact criteria for Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Juola explained
that in order to establish the most likely author, I must look for the number
of times Charlotte’s name appears in the top three rankings. The ideal
situation is that her name appears first all the time, but the professor added
that if her name comes out as first or second ‘almost every time,’ it’s ‘highly likely’ Charlotte is the author.
In the case of Wuthering
Heights, Charlotte’s name came up first in 15/15 categories; Harriet Martineau came second 8/15 times, Emily’s
name came second 4/15 times, and Jane Austen’s 3/15 times. Apparently, based on
science, Charlotte’s prose is an identical match to the prose in Wuthering Heights. Understandably,
Emily’s prose fell short.
When I analyzed
the Anne Brontë novels, the results were equally supportive of my hypothesis. For Agnes
Grey, Charlotte took top spot 14/15 times, while Jane Austen came first
1/15. Anne’s name occurred twice in 3rd place. The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall gave Jane Austen the prime spot 10/15 times,
with Charlotte coming in second 10/15
times in those categories, and first 5/15 times in the remaining ones.
Anne’s name was last 9/15 times and 5th 6/15 times. Jane Austen died
in 1817, so she obviously was not the author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but a brief manual analysis of
Northanger Abbey and the Brontë novels showed a number of syntactical similarities in over 50
examples. This could mean either Charlotte borrowed from Austen’s style or
Austen’s style was simply similar to Brontë’s at that time.
To test if the
program would recognize a Charlotte Brontë text, I programmed Jane Eyre as the unknown document and
kept the detractors and the Brontë samples the same. Her name came out as the author 15/15 times.
Is this proof
positive that Charlotte Bronte wrote all the Bronte novels?
Juola has stated that ‘modern
computational linguistic technologies have produced a faster, more objective,
and more scientific method of answering such questions on the basis of document
statistics. If some notion of writing
style can be objectively measured, it becomes possible to quantify exactly the
idea that this document is likely to have come from this person. Just
as every person has their own fingerprint or DNA, so every person has their own
writing style, an extension of their personality and cognitive habits.’[13]
He would never claim that his program is as certain as DNA, but that a set of
markers can raise the level of probability.
The results suggest Charlotte Brontë wrote the novels; the results are indicative of her being the
author, but without her comments, as in the case of J.K Rowling, we can only
speculate on the possibility. At the very
least, the results of these Author Attribution tests could ignite spirited debate
over authorship. Perhaps my suggestion that Charlotte is the sole genius in the
Brontë
family contains the elements less of fiction and more
of truth.
-->
[1] Elizabeth Rigby, ‘Vanity
Fair—and Jane Eyre.’ Quarterly Review: 84:167, (December
1848): 153-185. http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/peter.friesen/default.asp?go=252.
Accessed October 2015.
[3] Smith, George. The Recollections of a Long and Busy Life.
(1895); typescript in the National Library of Scotland, MSS 23191-2.
[5] Paul Collins,
“Poe’s Debut, Hidden in Plain Sight?” < http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/poes-debut-hidden-in-plain-sight>. Accessed October 2015.
[7] Anya Sostek,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Duquesne professor helps ID Rowling
as author of ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling.’< http://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2013/07/16/Duquesne-professor-helps-ID-Rowling-as-author-of-The-Cuckoo-s-Calling/stories/201307160124>. Accessed October 2015.
[8] Steve Kolowich, “The Professor Who
Declared, It’s J.K. Rowling.” July 29, 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/The-Professor-Who-Declared/140595> Accessed October 2015.
[10] Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights. Introduction by
Margaret Drabble. (London: Everyman Ltd., 1978) ix-xx.
[11] Emily Brontë’s Letters and Diary Papers. <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/diary_papers>
Accessed October 2015.
[12] Anne Brontë’s Birthday Paper July 30, 1841 and
Diary Paper July 31, 1845. <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/diary_papers>
Accessed October 2015.
[13] Patrick Juola, “Computational
Analysis of Authorship and Identity for Immigration.” <https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Computational+Analysis+juola> Accessed October 2015.
