La correspondance de Charlotte Brontë : coulisses du style et de l’écriture

Abstract

There may be for authors, behind the scene of writing and publication, another scriptural space : their letters. These may allow them to give vent to self-expression, to deliver a testimony of their lives, to speak for themselves when their job places them in a position of mouthpiece for other, fictitious, people’s lives. But being produced by literary people, these letters necessarily bear the mark of their author’s style. In the case of the letters of Charlotte Brontë, it is interesting to notice that the more professional Brontë becomes as a writer, the less her letters tend to be distinct from her public writing. Ever since the beginning of her correspondence, Brontë shows a literary hand through the first, rather unconscious, features of her style, but as she starts publishing, she transforms her letters into literary workshops, laboratories in which she tests her findings with the willing participation of her best friend and editors. Towards the end, it might seem difficult sometimes to make out which of the letters or the published writings is the space of literary performance. Brontë tends to lose spontaneity in her letters as her career progresses, and she seems to remain an actor of her art whatever the sphere in which she is writing. It looks as if the letters had progressively moved from their initial backstage location to the wings of the stage, and as if the threshold between scene and non-scene had blurred to reveal a woman increasingly in control of the display of herself.