Appearing Before the Public : Charlotte Brontë and the Author Portrait in the 1830s.

This essay reassesses Charlotte Brontë’s attitude to the public visibility of the author by looking at her early art work and writings. The focus is on two pencil drawings she made of characters from the juvenilia: Alexander Soult, a poet, and one of Branwell’s pseudonyms, and Zenobia Marchioness Ellrington, known as ‘the Madame De Staël of Verdopolis’. The essay situates Charlotte’s visual and verbal portraits of Soult and Zenobia within a broader culture of the author portrait in the literary albums and magazines of the 1830s. It identifies, for the first time, her sources for the image of Zenobia, and links her fantasy author portraits to Branwell’s ‘Pillar’ portrait.