When Patrick Brontë requested Elizabeth Gaskell to write his daughter Charlotte’s life, he envisaged a concise account that would silence the sensational claims that had circulated in the three months since her death, aged 38, on March 31st, 1855. The resulting, two-volume biography stands as a pioneering achievement in life-writing, despite many omissions, and even though its assumptions concerning gender and authorship have not aged well.
The story of Gaskell’s research and writing of The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) has been frequently told within modern Brontë biographies, but it deserves a book to itself. Graham Watson traces Gaskell’s fascination with Brontë from the first stirrings of her curiosity about the identity of the “Currer Bell” who had published Jane Eyre, through their four-year friendship, into Gaskell’s publication of the Life and its scandal-ridden aftermath. Charlotte herself appears as the last of the six Brontë children – no longer the aspiring writer depicted in plays and biopics, struggling for recognition alongside her sisters Emily and Anne, but an increasingly confident literary celebrity, whom Gaskell met in 1850, and who in June 1854 entered into a marriage that ended nine months later with her death in early pregnancy.
As Watson shows, the work of “inventing” Charlotte Brontë was begun by herself, in stories she told Gaskell about her motherless childhood in the Yorkshire parsonage presided over by her temperamental father, an Anglican vicar (and published author) from Co Down, and her grim first experience of boarding school. Gaskell’s pitying response conditioned her views of everything else she learned about Brontë; and while she found allies including Brontë's schoolfriend Mary Taylor, who agreed that “all her life was but labour and pain”, she ultimately had to issue an amended third edition of the Life after others objected to being implicated in Brontë's misfortunes.
Watson suggests that Gaskell was right to suspect that “after a lifetime of emotional starvation and grief ... [Brontë] was harried and manipulated by the men around her ... exploited into defeated compromise”. But notwithstanding his diligent archival research and clear narrative skill, more sustained argumentation is needed to qualify this claim against long-established critiques of the Life that have questioned Gaskell’s representation of Brontë as a victim.
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Faced with ongoing criticisms of “coarseness” in Brontë's novels, Gaskell sought to assure readers of her virtues as a long-suffering private woman, as distinct from the ambitious writer revealed in her letters (she wrote to her publisher of selecting details that gave a “nice feminine sense” of Brontë, to counter negative perceptions of her as “a ‘strong-minded emancipated’ woman”). In the Life, Gaskell considered “woman” and “authoress” as separate identities that required careful balancing – women being also subject to domestic obligations not shared by men, and additionally duty-bound to employ God-given literary talents “for the use and service of others”.
Brontë's agency as a single woman, following what she also believed to be divine inspiration to articulate emotional and intellectual discontents through her fictions, was troubling to Gaskell – who offset her own success as a politically engaged novelist with an irreproachable reputation as a busy Unitarian minister’s wife and mother of four daughters. For Gaskell, Brontë's tragedy was not only to be burdened by an excessive sense of duty to her father; it was that she never lived to develop her “gift” for use in a fully matured, socially responsible way.
Gaskell repeated anecdotes of Patrick Brontë's “eccentricities” in the Life on the grounds that they were “necessary for a right understanding of the life of his daughter”, but gave little further information on his life beyond basic details he provided concerning the “humble” Irish farming background from which he progressed to Cambridge University in 1802. Watson’s generally close adherence to Gaskell’s viewpoint enables effective narrative structuring, but excludes further exploration – now made possible by an extensive biographical literature – of how Patrick Brontë's relationship to Ireland formed the complex personality that inspired (and frequently infuriated) his daughter. Gaskell herself reproduced a letter of Brontë's from 1841, where she explicitly compared her ambition to study in Brussels with Patrick’s enterprise of leaving Ireland for Cambridge.
Watson expands more freely on Gaskell’s work in his account of Brontë's marriage to Patrick’s curate, the Antrim-born Arthur Bell Nicholls, who was educated in Banagher and at Trinity College Dublin. (Gaskell refrained from discussing the marriage in detail in the Life.) Like Gaskell, Nicholls regarded Brontë's identity as separate from “Currer Bell”; but the marriage also offered the potential for Brontë to begin a new reckoning with her Irish heritage – which now attracts increasing public interest. While Brontë's honeymoon took in only Nicholls’s connections in Dublin and Banagher, and picturesque tours of Kilkee and Killarney, Brontë tourists will now also find an interpretive centre devoted to her father’s beginnings in the “Brontë Homeland” region surrounding Drumballyroney, Co Down.
