In a letter dated March 5, 1839, a 23-year-old Charlotte Brontë wrote to the Reverend Henry Nussey to decline his marriage proposal, which she had received less than a week before. In the letter, which is very polite but very clear, she tells him that she has “no personal repugnance to the idea of a union” with him (how charitable), but, she writes:
I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you. It has always been my habit to study the character of those amongst whom I chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and can imagine what description of woman would suit you for a wife. Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original—her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her “personal attractions” sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride.
As for me, you do not know me, I am not this serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose—you would think me romantic and [eccentric—you would] say I was satirical and [severe]. [However, I scorn] deceit and I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.
Classic it’s-not-you-it’s-me letdown, and Nussey took it on the chin. “Received an unfavourable reply fm C.B.,” he wrote in his diary on March 9. “The will of the Lord be done.”
Eight years later, Brontë’s Jane Eyre would be published. As Juliet Barker points out in her biography of the Brontës, this rejected proposal may have inspired St John Rivers’ proposal to Jane Eyre—“he, like Nussey, needing a wife to support him in his work. If the character of St. John Rivers is also drawn from that of Nussey, then Charlotte was indeed wise not to marry him.”
We should all be glad she didn’t, as we probably wouldn’t have Jane Eyre at all if she had.