What happened to the manuscript itself likely will remain a mystery, though it is a certainty that Charlotte carried the secret of its contents to the grave. In such circumstances, she must have felt justified in destroying the manuscript. Had Newby ever received the manuscript, he would undoubtedly have published it, so the obvious inference is again that Charlotte, finding and reading Emily’s second novel, decided that its subject, too, was “an entire mistake” and would not improve “Ellis Bell’s” reputation. Barker theorizes that Charlotte may have feared the public backlash that Emily’s bold prose invited from the very beginning, and that the content of the second novel may have been even more shocking and risqué than Wuthering Heights: The Brontës’ biographer Juliet Barker certainly seems to lean toward the idea that Charlotte did away with the manuscript. Charlotte’s notoriously poor management of her sisters’ literary estates after their deaths bordered on malicious. Whether Charlotte really did burn the manuscript of Emily’s second novel has never been proven or confirmed, but the myth has some foundation. Even the most disorganized of publishers would be able to differentiate between the two.Ĭharlotte’s notoriously poor management of her sisters’ literary estates after their deaths bordered on malicious. But how could this be, when the letter was specifically addressed to Ellis Bell, Emily’s pen name? Anne’s was Acton Bell.
Some scholars speculate that this letter was actually meant for Anne Brontë, who also had a second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in progress. I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your new work if it be an improvement on your first… I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your second novel.
The letter is a part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s collection of the family’s correspondence. A letter from Emily’s publisher Thomas Cautley Newby, dated February 15, 1848, shows as much. Emily Brontë, the author of the English literary classic Wuthering Heights, did die tragically young, and she did leave a second novel unfinished. This forlorn, Victorian scene is not entirely a work of fiction.
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