‘A Strong Wish for Wings’: The Epistolary Relationship and Intellectual Collaboration between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë

Abstract

This article disinters the impact of the correspondence between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë on their respective intellectual lives and writing. Supplementing the epistolary archive, textual evidence from Shirley (1849) and Miss Miles (1890) demonstrates the powerful collaborative dynamic between the two writers, which not only affected their work but also helped them to cultivate a sense of literary legitimacy in a publishing context habitually hostile to women’s voices. Brontë and Taylor’s letters indicate the explicit influence of one another’s thinking upon their writing, and suggest that the writers shared a sense of belonging to an intellectual partnership through their sustained correspondence. Simon-Martin’s theory of ‘epistolary education’ illuminates how Taylor and Brontë’s friendship through letters was formative in developing both writers’ feminist consciousness and their agitation for social reform, as well as their authorial agency.