Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell: The Story of the Brontës' Secret Identities

For a glorious eighteen months, the most talked-about novelists in Britain did not exist. Jane Eyre was the sensation of 1847; Wuthering Heights its scandalous stable-mate; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the bestseller polite society pretended not to read – and all were signed by three mysterious "brothers", Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, about whom London literary gossip could establish precisely nothing. Were they one man or three? A husband-and-wife team? A hoax? The truth – three parson's daughters plotting around a Yorkshire dining table – was better than any rumour, and the story of the pseudonyms, and of the day two of the sisters walked into a London publisher's office to explode them, is one of the most delicious episodes in literary history. It also explains a great deal about what these women were up against.

Why hide? The Southey doctrine

The sisters' motives were explicit, and Charlotte later set them down: they chose names "positively masculine" in effect while not being quite that, because they suspected – correctly – that authoresses were "liable to be looked on with prejudice", their writing judged as women's work rather than work. Charlotte had personal evidence on file. In 1837, aged twenty, she had written to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey asking whether she might hope to be a writer; his reply, courteous and devastating, informed her that "literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." A decade later, the Bells were the sisters' answer: names that would force the critics to review the books, not the bonnets. They kept their own initials – Currer for Charlotte, Ellis for Emily, Acton for Anne, with "Bell" possibly winking at Arthur Bell Nicholls, their father's curate and Charlotte's future husband – a private code threaded through a public disguise.

First outing: the book that sold two copies

The Bells debuted quietly – very quietly. In 1846, at the sisters' own expense, appeared Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell: a slim volume born of Charlotte's electrifying discovery of Emily's private poetry the previous autumn (and of Emily's fury at the trespass, soothed only by the armour of pseudonymity). The collection received a couple of kind notices and sold, famously, two copies. Undeterred to a degree that still inspires, the "brothers" each finished a novel and sent the bundle round the publishers. Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights were accepted – on poor terms – by the slippery Thomas Newby; Charlotte's The Professor was rejected everywhere, but one house, Smith, Elder & Co., rejected it so encouragingly that she sent them her next manuscript within weeks. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, "edited by Currer Bell", appeared in October 1847 and simply detonated – a runaway bestseller that made the invisible author the mystery of the season. Newby rushed out Emily's and Anne's novels that December to ride the wave.

The guessing game – and the swindle that ended it

Speculation about the Bells consumed reviews and dinner parties: the books' passion and "coarseness" convinced many critics that no woman could have written them – a backhanded tribute the sisters noted grimly – while sharper readers detected female hands, and others insisted all three Bells were one prolific individual. That last theory was the fuse. In 1848 the unscrupulous Newby, marketing Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in America, allowed it to be offered as the new book "by the author of Jane Eyre" – effectively selling Acton as Currer. Charlotte's publisher wrote to her in alarm; the sisters' honour was impugned; and Charlotte and Anne resolved on the spot to prove that the Bells were plural. (Emily, characteristically, refused to go – and extracted a promise that her identity stay hidden.)

July 1848: "We are three sisters"

What followed is the scene every Brontë lover treasures. Charlotte and Anne walked through a thunderstorm to Keighley, took the night train, arrived in London unwashed and unslept, and presented themselves on a Saturday morning at Smith, Elder's offices in Cornhill – two tiny, plainly dressed provincial women asking for the head of the firm. George Smith, all of twenty-four himself, was handed his own letter to "Currer Bell, Esq." by one of them and demanded to know how she had it. "We are three sisters," Charlotte answered – and enjoyed, she admitted, the spectacle of his astonishment. Smith, once revived, wanted to parade the Bells before literary London; the sisters accepted only an opera trip and some sightseeing, swore him to secrecy, and went home to Haworth and their dying brother. Within a year, the secret hardly mattered: Branwell, Emily and Anne were dead, and Charlotte – her identity leaking irresistibly as fame grew – faced the world alone as the last of the Bells. Her later novels appeared as "by Currer Bell" still, the mask kept as memorial as much as shield. The original title pages and manuscripts can be seen in collections at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the British Library, explorable at bl.uk.

What the pen names still teach

The Bells were a tactical triumph – the books got their unprejudiced hearing, and won it – but the episode's lasting lesson lies in what made the tactic necessary. Reviewers who praised Jane Eyre as the work of a powerful male mind turned sniffy on learning the truth; Anne's unflinching Tenant was deemed doubly shocking from a woman; and the whole masquerade stands as Exhibit A in the long history of women writing under cover, from George Eliot to the present day. Visitors to Haworth meet the story where it happened: the dining table where three "brothers" were invented, the little writing desks that carried the secret. On our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside – maximum six guests – the tale of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell is one of the day's set-pieces, told on the road into Brontë Country: the greatest literary deception ever mounted from a parsonage, and the two small sisters who ended it in person, dripping rainwater on a London publisher's floor.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.