Following the ebbs and flows of Charlotte’s life

Clothing has long been dismissed as the least of things: decorative, domestic, feminine – beneath the level of serious inquiry. Yet garments are more than mere frippery. They are the closest objects we possess; they move with us, mark us, absorb us. They register the body’s shape and its changes, its illnesses and recoveries, its habits and hesitations. They carry the impress of work, of loss, of weather, of touch. They are, in the fullest sense, first hand witnesses to a life lived.

Virginia Woolf, unusually alert to the expressive force of clothing, once wrote that garments “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Yet even Woolf hesitated before Charlotte Brontë’s surviving clothes. Visiting Haworth in 1904 and confronted with the thin muslin dress and the tiny boots Charlotte had worn, she feared that their very existence made her literary heroine smaller, slighter, more fragile.

Charlotte Brontë’s spotted canvas and leather boots, D96 © Eleanor Houghton

As a woman writer who had herself fought to be heard, Woolf recoiled from anything that seemed to pull Charlotte back into the domestic sphere or distract from her formidable gift. She instinctively feared that attending to Brontë’s surviving clothes, evocative and powerful as they were, would somehow diminish her. It was an instinct I recognised in myself.

Yet, when read slowly, methodically, with real attention, the garments themselves resist that diminishment. They speak with clarity. Altered, mended, shaped, stained, worn, they record the ebbs and flows of her life in ways that written sources cannot, offering a form of evidence that is at once intimate, material and unmediated.

They speak of her body – one constrained by the harsh metal busk of her 1842 corset, marked by lifelong self scrutiny, or diminished by childhood illness. They speak, too, of the world around that body. Charlotte’s white-worked baby bonnet carries the imprint of familial love; her well worn black lace bonnet veil registers long years of mourning; her dark silk dress reflects the practical adaptations she made for her difficult, unhappy work as a governess.

A whole wardrobe of evidence

Their evidence is sharpened, deepened, and sometimes even transformed when set alongside the extraordinary written record that has remained. Few men or women of the 19th century have left behind such a breadth of surviving material. Charlotte’s clothing archive is remarkable not only for its size, but also for its span. There are garments from her first years of life and garments from her last, There are clothes for work and clothes for fame. There are clothes shaped by grief, by fear, by success and by daily labour. 

Alongside them sits a written record of equal richness: letters, juvenilia, account books, novels, portraits and self portraits, the recollections of those who knew her, and the scholarship that has gathered around her for more than a century. To this we can add the wide constellation of contextual sources – fashion plates, school prospectuses, ladies’ magazines, and the literature and visual culture of the period. 

A single garment can speak, but Charlotte left us a whole wardrobe of evidence. The clothes sit within that constellation of traces, but they also anchor it. They give the written record weight, scale, temperature, texture.

Unsettling Charlotte’s narrative

Taken together, this huge body of evidence also unsettles the narratives that have shaped Charlotte Brontë’s posthumous image. Elizabeth Gaskell’s tender but moralising portrait in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, the long standing habit of sartorially subsuming Charlotte into the plain, sombre figure of her most famous heroine, Jane Eyre, and the later emphasis on her solitude and seriousness have all contributed to an image that highlights some aspects of her life while obscuring others. The clothes offer a different emphasis, for they return Charlotte to the realm of the material. 

Each bonnet, gown and parasol contributes to a radical, new perspective. Yes, there are the anticipated neat, dark gowns, but there are many other pieces too. Some startle with their pattern, texture and exoticism. Some are vivid turquoise, some cerulean blue. There are bold, sarape inspired cloaks and heavily beaded Mohawk moccasins. There is, too, her Pepto Bismol pink wrapping gown, made as part of her wedding trousseau in 1854.

Charlotte Brontë’s pink cotton wrapping gown or ‘wrapper’, D51 © Eleanor Houghton

The intimate story of the pink wrapping gown

It was on her honeymoon, perhaps while staying at the Castle Hotel in Conwy, that Charlotte first donned this gown. Ordered only weeks earlier, during the brief, intense period between her engagement and marriage, the pink wrapper was drastically different from the more structured dresses that she wore in public. Its loose construction, soft cotton and vivid colour placed it firmly in the private, hidden realm of early mornings and late evenings alone with her new husband – the unguarded hours of travel, rest and intimacy. 

Wrappers held a distinct place in 19th century dress. Unboned and unstructured, worn without the rigid underpinnings that shaped a woman’s public silhouette, they were the garments in which she moved most freely. Respectable but unmistakably domestic, they marked a threshold between the outward and inward self. To see a woman in her wrapper was to glimpse her in a state of ease rarely visible beyond the confines of home. Charlotte’s own gown, with its generous cut and brazen colour, belonged to this intimate sphere – one that now included her husband, Arthur.

Her choice of pink is striking. Though pink is now heavily gendered, its meanings were far less fixed in the 1850s. Mid century men still wore pink waistcoats, banyans and smoking caps, so it was not an inevitable choice for a private, feminine garment. Nor did Charlotte favour bright pink elsewhere in her wardrobe. After searching major fashion archives in Europe and America, I found few pink wrappers from this period; most were sober, patterned, autumnal. Clearly Charlotte was not following fashion. The wrapper stands apart, a deliberate, romantic, even sensual choice for her new married life.

Her fiction illuminates the colour’s charge. In her novel, Villette, Lucy Snowe is dressed by her godmother in an alien “pink dress” for a concert. The colour draws the usually retiring Lucy out of her habitual shadows and provokes Paul Emmanuel’s volcanic jealousy. In his imagination the pink deepens to red, the colour of passion and female “degeneracy.” Yet he later concedes that the dress “had the merit of looking rather well” and so begins a new phase of their relationship.

There is, of course, no way of knowing whether Charlotte’s own wrapper produced a similarly aphrodisiacal reaction in Arthur Bell Nicholls. After waiting so long for her, he may not have needed much encouragement. As for Charlotte, despite her decision to marry having been prompted by pragmaticism rather than passion, her letters home from North Wales and Ireland show no reluctance or distaste.

Though a heavy cold may have delayed the consummation of the marriage, her correspondence is warm, steady and increasingly tender. She writes of “my dear husband” with a new ease, suggesting that the intimacies of married life, however unfamiliar at first, had begun to strengthen the bond between them.

A more three-dimensional Charlotte

Of course, Charlotte’s vibrant pink wrapper is one garment amidst many, but it points to what the whole wardrobe makes possible. When I began my research, I had no sense of the picture that might emerge from these seemingly scattered survivors. Each item had to be dated, its provenance established, its testimony taken before being set carefully alongside the primary and secondary sources that survive.

For some time, each testament stood apart. They were different in kind, different in scale. But then came the slow work of joining these fragments, these first hand witnesses, to the wider traces of Charlotte’s life. And, as the picture sharpened, I found myself returning to Woolf – not to her worry that clothes might diminish her – but to her deeper intuition that they alter the angle of vision.

These garments do exactly that. They reveal a Charlotte who is braver, bolder, more three dimensional than the familiar silhouette allows.  She emerges quite as indomitable in voice and imagination as Woolf had imagined, but also more real, more raw, more thinking and breathing than she could ever have known.

Charlotte Brontë the woman, vividly alive

Brontë’s surviving wardrobe does not reduce her; it releases her. It returns her to the material world in all its texture and contradiction, and in doing so, it offers a radical new perspective: one in which Charlotte Brontë stands before us not as an icon, but as a woman fully, vividly alive.

About the author

Eleanor Houghton is a Brontë scholar, writer and illustrator. She studied English at the University of Oxford before being awarded a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in History. In 2022, in collaboration with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, she curated a large-scale exhibition on the surviving wardrobe of Charlotte Brontë. An expert in 18th and 19th century clothing, literature and social history, she often works as consultant for film and TV, novelists and museums. Her detailed drawings are widely sold and exhibited.

Buy Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes.

All illustrations featured in this article © Eleanor Houghton.