The Life of Charlotte Bronte (78 page)

3
(p. 391)
“I have seen none,
except ...
Emancipation
of Women”
: The article is “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which appeared in the
Westmin
ster Review
55 (July 1851): 289-311. Although J. S. Mill is given authorial credit, Harriet Taylor (1807-1858), Mill’s collaborator, companion, and eventually his wife, is believed to have been the primary author.

4
(p. 396)
“Melville seemed to
me...
Maurice whose ministry I should frequent”:
The Evangelical Henry Melville (1798-1871) was considered one of the greatest preachers of his day. F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), a Christian Socialist, believed the church should be an instrument of social equality.

5
(p. 403)
“the close seemed to me scarcely equal to ’Rose
Douglas’ ”
: Sarah R. Whitehead wrote
Rose Douglas; or, Sketches of
a
Country Parish, Being the Autobiography of
a
Scotch Minister’s Daughter
(1851) and
Two Families
(1852).

6
(p. 403)
“I read Miss
Kavanagh’s
‘Women of
Christianity’ ”
: The full title of Julia Kavanagh’s book is
Women of Christianity: Exemplary for Acts of Piety and Charity
(1852).

7
(p. 416)
“I called her ’Lucy Snowe’ ...
‘lucus a non lucendo’
principle”
: The principle is an etymological contradiction. The word lucus means “dark grove” in Latin, but it is derived from the verb
lucere,
“to shine,” based on the absence of light. Similarly, Lucy Snowe’s “external coldness” belies her inner fire.

8
(p. 418)
some word or act of hers had given offence:
Gaskell minimizes Brontë’s fears here to gloss over her true cause for concern—the fact that she had represented George Smith and his mother in Villette as Mrs. Bretton and her son Dr. John. Smith later owned that the portraits were based on his mother and him.

1
(p. 421)
put aside all consideration of how she should reply, excepting
as
he wished!:
Brontë had her own reservations about marrying Nicholls, independent of her father’s objections. See the Introduction.

2
(p. 424)
Miss
Martineau...
wounded her to the
quick...
merely artistic
fault: In her review of
Villette
in the
Daily News,
February 3, 1853 (Allot, pp. 171-174), Martineau faulted Brontë for making love too central to the lives of her female characters, insisting that there “are substantial, heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love.”

3
(p. 426)
“I read attentively all you say about Miss
Martineau...
hundreds have forsaken her”:
Martineau objected to this characterization, and to Gaskell’s account of her rift with Brontë. In the third edition Gaskell included a footnote and additional material in the body of the text to represent Martineau’s side of the story, which was, in the main, a reiteration of the fact that Brontë urged her to be frank with her criticism.

4
(p. 438)
Mrs.
Marsh’s
story ... Miss Bremer’s story:
Anne Marsh-Caldwell wrote “The Deformed,” published in
Two Old Men’s Tales
(1834); Fredrika Bremer wrote
The Neighbours
(translated in 1842).

5
(p. 440) Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter’s marriage: Gaskell may have directly contributed to this change of heart by asking Richard Monckton Milnes to use his influence to secure a pension that would increase Nicholls’s income. Gaskell urged secrecy: “If my well-meant treachery becomes known I will lose her friendship, which I prize most highly” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 168).

6
(p. 443)
“my father’s
sympathies... are all
with Justice
and
Europe,
against Tyranny and Russia”
: Brontë refers here to the diplomatic prelude to the Crimean War.

7
(p. 451)
natural cause for her miserable indisposition:
Brontë’s letters to Nussey indicate that she was pregnant. It is unclear whether her death was caused by a complication of pregnancy or by an infectious disease.

Throughout The Life of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell claims Brontë as her “dear friend.” Their status as leading Victorian novelists initially brought the two women to each other’s notice, and as they embarked upon their friendship, professional appreciation quickly translated into a deep personal connection. In the mid-nineteenth century, Gaskell was the more popular novelist, but her renown gradually faded after her death, while Brontë’s fame grew after she died. Brontë’s continued popularity owes much to Gaskell’s Life, and Gaskell’s enduring reputation has been earned as much from her only attempt at biography as from her novels. This mutual benefit to two authors—subject and biographer—echoes that which resulted following James Boswell’s publication in 1791 of
The Life of Samuel Johnson,
LL.D.; widely considered the greatest biography in the English language, it enhanced the reputation of both men.

While some readers now consider Gaskell’s fiction overly sentimental, others continue to enjoy her novels of manners
Cranford
(1853) and
Wives and Daughters
(1866), and to read and study her “condition of England” novels
Mary Barton
(1848) and North and South (1854), which prove particularly enduring as they shed light on the social history of their time. As for
The Life of Charlotte
Brontë, it is the depth of the work and the sympathy the writer obviously felt for her subject that make it compelling to readers today. Much of the book’s immediate and continued success derives from Gaskell’s talent for, as Eneas Sweetland Dallas put it in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine,
“personal discourse and familiar narrative,” novelistic touches that were enthusiastically received by a reading public thirsty for confidences and scandal.

Most dramatically, Gaskell describes the plight of Charlotte’s feckless brother, Branwell, who, she alleges, engaged in a sexual liaison with Lydia Robinson, the wife of the man who had hired him as a tutor. The present text of
The Life of Charlotte
Brontë is that of the first 479 edition, which includes Gaskell’s original and full “account of Branwell Brontë’s wretched fate,” as William Caldwell Roscoe described it in the
National Review,
adding that it was “recorded with unnecessary detail.” Here is what Gaskell wrote:

As Gaskell prepares to quote from some of Charlotte’s letters to bolster her case against Robinson, she continues, “Now let us read, not merely of the suffering of her guilty accomplice but of the misery she caused to innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door.”

Gaskell’s version of Branwell’s affair with Robinson provoked a strong reaction in the press. James Fitzjames Stephen, writing in the Edinburgh Review, railed against Gaskell: “No doubt, from mistaken information and mistaken motives... she appears to have entirely misconceived the duties and the rights of her position as an authoress.” Stephen continued, “A man’s honour, a woman’s virtue, are not to be blown to the winds merely because it suits the humour of a romancer to rake up some imaginary or forgotten transgression—to dress it in colours of fiction, heightened by the mischievous attraction of personal slander.”

Not only was Lydia Robinson still living when the Life was published, she was a prominent member of London society (she had remarried and become Lady Scott). Upon publication of the book, she immediately filed a libel suit against Gaskell; as a result, all unsold copies of
The Life of Charlotte
Brontë were pulled from the shelves. In a letter from Mrs. Gaskell’s solicitor that appeared in the London
Times,
the author endeavored
“to retract every statement
contained in that work which imputes to a widowed lady, referred to, but not named therein, any breach of her conjugal, of her maternal, and of her social duties, &c.” All subsequent editions of the Life were issued as “revised,” to indicate that all passages deemed incriminating to Lady Scott had been removed.

To the advantage of both Brontë and Gaskell, the Life has outlived the topical scandal that plagued its initial publication to become one of the most widely read biographies written in English.

In this section, we
aim
to provide the reader with
an array
of perspectives on the text,
as
well
as
questions that
challenge
those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse
as
reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of
later
generations,
and appreciations
written throughout the work’s history. Following the
commentary, a
series of questions seeks to filter Elizabeth
Gaskell’s
The Life of
Charlotte Brontë
through
a
variety of points of view
and
bring
about a
richer understanding of this enduring work.

The story of a woman’s life unfolded in this book is calculated to make the old feel young and the young old. Persons who have been conversant with society and manners as they existed in the remote corners of England within the century will feel themselves strangely recalled to the narrow homes, the grim prejudices, the few pleasures and privileges belonging to a period of heavy taxation, costly literature, and limited intercourse, by the picture of a provincial parsonage and its inmates here set before them. Some of those, on the other hand, who are bursting with life, and brimming with creative power, may feel palsied (as it were by some cold prophecy) while they follow the record of a career of self-denial and struggle, sustained to the last with courage, principle, and genius, but without hope. Nevertheless, a true tale of what may be achieved in spite of disabilities, be the facts ever so cheerless, let the pilgrim’s lot have been cast on ever so rugged a road, let his cup have been ever so full of the waters of bitterness, can hardly be followed to its close without some strength being gained for the reader. By all, this book will be read with interest. As a work of Art, we do not recollect a life of a woman by a woman so well executed....

Protracted life and success, and increased experience with what is best in society (not what is most convenient in observance), might have ripened, and mellowed, and smoothed the creations of this singular novelist without destroying their charm of force and individuality. But conjecture stops at the grave-side. At the time when “the silver lining of the cloud” began to show itself, when domestic cherishing and prosperity seemed to await her after so many hard, dark, cruel years, the end came. All this is gently and sadly told by Mrs. Gaskell, with whom the task has been a labour of love (a little, also, of defence),—and who, we repeat, has produced one of the best biographies of a woman by a woman we can recall to mind.

—from an unsigned review in
The Athenaeum
(April 4, 1857)

Besides the actual poverty of incident that characterizes this life, the materials for largely illustrating it, such as it was, even in its later period, and still more in its growing time, are wanting. Very little correspondence can have passed between the Misses Brontë and other people, and of that little less had been preserved. Their father, who has survived them, is very old and infirm, and little more than vague general recollections seem to have been obtained from him. Charlotte does not appear to have been communicative about herself and her proceedings while she lived, and she lived in such retirement and isolation that no one now seems able to describe minutely what she left unrecorded. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, it is impossible to read through Mrs. Gaskell’s two volumes without a strong conviction that Charlotte Brontë was a woman as extraordinary by her character as by her genius. She possessed in a remarkable degree, not only the poetical imagination shown in her works, but an unconquerable will, and a sense of duty to which everything in her life was subordinated....

Those who can be powerfully interested by character developing itself without striking outward incident—who can follow the drama of the inner life in a lonely parsonage, where three eccentric girls, and an eccentric father, with an equally eccentric old Yorkshire servant, for the most part lead an existence of which one day is precisely in its outward aspect like every other—will find in Mrs. Gaskell’s account of Charlotte Brontë and her family one of the profoundest tragedies of modern life, if tragedy be, as we believe it to be, the contest of humanity with inexorable fate—the anguish and the strife through which the spirit nerves itself for a grander sphere—the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory.

—April 4, 1857

I have just finished your “Life of Charlotte Bronte”—which has afforded exquisite delight to my evenings on this remote patch of rock, round which the Atlantic roars, and dashes like a troop of lions, making a solitude almost equal to Haworth moors—quite equal, as far as any society I get here. If I had any public means of expressing my high sense of the skill, delicacy and artistic power of your Biography, I should not trouble you with this note. But it is a law of the literary organization that it must relieve itself in expression, and I discharge my emotion through the penny post; at least, such of it as was not discharged in wet eyes and swelling heart, as chapter after chapter was read.