Charlotte’s new friendships were further complicated by the arrival of Eliza Cook, a gallant young writer whose poem “The Old Arm-Chair” had been published when she was just seventeen, and whose work was widely read and pirated on both sides of the Atlantic. One evening at the Laurences’ Charlotte was deep in conversation when she saw a woman in her twenties striding through the crowd in a man’s shirt, a skirt, and woolen cloak. The woman “rather sauntered than walked” over to the fire, where she pulled up a chair and put her feet up on the fender. Leaning back precariously, she shouted for a beer. Her dark ringlets cascaded messily over her collar, and Charlotte, catching her gaze, found herself staring into the girl’s large blue eyes. Introducing themselves, Charlotte struck up a conversation, and Cook revealed that she had already seen Charlotte as Romeo and been so starstruck she wrote a poem about her.
Not since Rosalie Sully had Charlotte felt this strongly about a woman. They began going everywhere together, and Eliza was so energized by Charlotte’s company she wrote more and faster than ever before, completing a manuscript in months. When Eliza’s publisher delayed publishing the book, Charlotte wrote to admonish him. The volume, with a dedication to Charlotte, arrived in bookstores a few months later. One afternoon Charlotte and Eliza were out walking when they were caught in a sudden rainstorm. They sheltered under a tree, smelling the wet warmth of each other’s bodies. Then Charlotte began to sing, her voice rising up through the branches, soft and sad. The song was one of Eliza’s favorites, a Scottish ballad called “Jock O’Hazeldean,” which her mother had sung to her when Eliza was a girl. Charlotte’s voice was warm, worn, rough as the road the dead traveled on, shot through with wild longing.
The ballad tells the story of a woman pining for a lover she cannot have. Their love, forbidden, drives him away and he is now dead, forever beyond her grasp. Her parents try to force her to marry another young man in the village, but the day of the wedding the bride escapes through the veil, “ower the border and awa’ wi’ Jock O’Hazeldean.” It was a song of love, outlawed.
Charlotte sent a copy of Eliza’s poems to Geraldine Jewsbury, who read them feeling like she was meeting her own ghost. She wasn’t impressed by the poems, judging the writer too in thrall to her subject to write well. “If you ever quarrel,” she wrote to Charlotte cattily, Eliza “will write a much finer poem on you.” Charlotte pretended to be ignorant of Geraldine’s jealousy while consciously inflaming it. “I am not an angel but a wild cat,” Geraldine warned her, “and I’ll scratch you if I can’t beat you.” Geraldine tried to temper her affection, knowing she would be “made miserable for it someday.”
Charlotte and Eliza stayed together for nearly two intense years. And when Eliza finally felt Charlotte drifting away, it made her so anxious she became seriously ill. She searched Charlotte’s face, finding signs that the woman she loved did not love her back. Charlotte had moved on, and it broke Eliza’s heart.
By 1848 Charlotte had become famous and was playing Romeo to many women. “Darling,” she wrote to a young actress named Sarah Anderton, whom she met during an engagement in Sheffield, “I love you. And that will give you courage, will it not? Looks of love have a more healing power with me than all the doctory stuff in the world,” she wrote to Anderton in the winter of that year.
Charlotte also craved her own household and was happiest when surrounded by friends and family. Her brother Charlie, who had joined her in London shortly after she arrived, remarked that she never went anywhere except with an entourage. Charlotte had also convinced her mother to follow Susan to London, and now she had her whole family with her, even little Ned.
She and Susan continued to perform Romeo and Juliet to enormous crowds across Great Britain. With the help of Mary Howitt, Eliza (who remained her friend), Geraldine, and others, Charlotte became a household name.
Charlotte began to lease her image to make more money, and a Staffordshire figurine depicting Charlotte as a heroic Romeo with Susan leaning against her in a half swoon soon decorated mantelpieces across England. Newspapers rushed to publish etchings of her likeness. She encouraged the publicity but half-joked to a friend about “the libels which have been perpetrated upon me in the way of engravings… I am made virtually a hag.” By the end of 1848 Charlotte seemed to know someone in every circle. Her connections and visibility as an actress gave her new power. When Charles Dickens received a letter from her, he wrote to his friend Macready, “I ought to answer immediately.”
Finally, the exhausting life on the stage lost its allure for Susan. While touring in Liverpool, she caught the eye of a scientist named James Sheridan Muspratt, and he soon proposed. She would have to leave the stage to marry him, but despite the lost income Mary Eliza urged her daughter to do it. Charlotte again protested that Susan was not in love, and to marry anyway would be to “sell her soul.”
Young Ned did not like Muspratt, and Susan’s new fiancé was not eager to raise another man’s son. Charlotte and Ned had always been close—he called her Big Mama—and she was happy to keep him with her. Charlotte played peacemaker between Ned and Susan, reminding him that his mother had given birth to him very young, when she was still a child herself. Finally, Charlotte wrote to the American government to have Ned’s absent father declared dead, and
