The life of Charlotte Brontë

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  When Gaskell began her acquaintance with Brontë in August 1850, it was at a time of bereavement for Brontë, who had lost all three of her siblings to tuberculosis in quick succession, from September 1848 to May 1849. Her grief was exacerbated by her decision to prepare a new edition of her sisters’ novels, Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne’s Agnes Grey (1847), to which she planned to append a selection of their poetry. Rereading her sisters’ work “ ‘occasioned a depression of spirits well nigh intolerable,’ ” Brontë told Nussey in September 1850. Brontë found that her grief intensified, rather than diminished, over time: “ ‘I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the solitude and isolation of my lot’ ” (p. 361). She described being “haunted” by recollections of her sisters that grew “intolerably poignant,” magnified both by her imagination and by her solitude (pp. 361, 371).

  During their initial meeting Brontë supplied Gaskell with a concise but thorough account of her life up to that point, rounding off her pathetic description of the recent deaths of her sisters with the prediction that her own “death will be quite lonely; having no friend or relation in the world to nurse her, & her father dreading a sick room above all places” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 75). Brontë, having been exposed to tuberculosis, understandably feared that her own death might be imminent, and her statement need not be read as purely melodramatic. It does not accurately reflect the objective truth of her situation, however. She had a very close friend, Nussey, and the housekeeper, Tabby, who was more like family than a servant, to care for her. It does reveal a sense of the emotional and intellectual isolation that Brontë felt in no longer being a member of a creative sisterhood. As such, it constitutes an appeal for Gaskell’s understanding and friendship, born of an urge to forge a new literary sisterhood. Brontë emphasizes her personal tragedy and fragility perhaps to offset the incendiary nature of Jane Eyre, whose reputation preceded her, in approaching the more conventionally feminine and socially acceptable Gaskell. Gaskell certainly came away from this meeting with the feeling that Brontë needed her protection, a feeling that is symbolized by her recollection that Brontë’s tiny hands felt like “the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm” (p. 77). If the Life sentimentalizes Brontë and her suffering, Brontë was complicit in that construction.

  “Morbidity”

  Brontë’s cast of mind when she met Gaskell was partly the result of recent sorrow and partly an ongoing psychological reality for Brontë, whose letters indicate that she endured a lifelong struggle with depression. Although she is sometimes evasive about its cause, Gaskell confronts the emotional intensity of Brontë’s depression unflinchingly. Her directness caused one penetrating reviewer to observe that the “inconsiderate” reader would regard the Life as “an unhealthy book” because it “discusses sick minds almost without admitting that they are unsound” (Easson, p. 382). Gaskell wavers between assigning a “constitutional” or physiological cause to Brontë’s depression, and deeming it the product of “this pressure of grief which had crushed all buoyancy of expectation out of her” (p. 95). She cautions the idle critic who would condemn Brontë’s work as “morbid” to remember how death swept her “hearthstone bare of life and love” (p. 297).

  Gaskell traces the origin of Brontë’s “hopelessness” to the loss of her mother and her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, when she was still a child (p. 95). In retrospectively attributing a depressive affect to Brontë, Gaskell writes: “I can well imagine that the grave serious composure... was no acquisition of later years, but dated from that early age when she found herself in the position of an elder sister to motherless children” (p. 77). Gaskell’s description of Brontë’s mother is animated by the same dual impulse that informs her portrait of Brontë. On the one hand, Maria Branwell is made to bear the burden of conventional feminine respectability that her daughter was accused of lacking; on the other, she is an independent thinker and writer, and her letters are the “ ‘records of a mind whence my own sprang,’ ” as Brontë herself put it (p. 336). In service of the latter, Gaskell provides extracts from Maria Branwell’s letters to the Reverend Patrick Brontë written during their engagement, and refers to a monograph Maria Branwell intended for publication, “The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns” (p. 40). In addition, when Gaskell enumerates the literary influences upon the young Brontë, listing the canonical authors she found in her father’s library, the biographer also includes the imaginative legacy Brontë inherited from her mother in the form of her collection of romantically sea-stained “Lady’s Magazines” and “Methodist Magazines,” full of superstition and romance, that Brontë (as she noted in a letter) “ ‘read by stealth,’ ” because her father did not approve of them (pp. 97-98, 149).

  The Maria Branwell that Gaskell acquaints us with diffidently prepares for matrimony by “learning by heart a ‘pretty little hymn’ of Mr. Brontë’s composing,” and baking her own wedding cake (p. 39). After marriage, Gaskell reports, “Maria Branwell fades out of sight; we have no more direct intercourse with her; we hear of her as Mrs. Brontë, but it is as an invalid, not far from death” (p. 39). With a Gothic flourish, Gaskell compresses years of married life and childbearing into the ominous report that “Mrs. Brontë was confined to the bed-room from which she never came forth alive” (p. 43).

  The fate of Brontë’s mother is meant to foreshadow Brontë’s own fate after her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, when, as Gaskell sees it, her professional identity became subsumed into her husband’s as she performed the endless round of duties incumbent upon a curate’s wife at the expense of cultivating her imaginative life. Before commencing the section of the Life that details Brontë’s engagement and marriage, Gaskell exhorts the reader once more to consider the “intellectual side of character, before we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife” (p. 440). According to Victorian social economy, Gaskell warns, the birth of Mrs. Nicholls entails the death of Miss Brontë, but that is a system of accounting that the Life works to redress.

  “Coarseness”

  Gaskell intended the biography to vindicate Brontë, who had come under personal attack for the “coarseness” of her works. The charge was a general one, indicating that the novels were not sufficiently feminine or delicate either in expression or subject matter. Reviewers objected particularly to Brontë’s frank treatment of female desire, but the angry subtexts of her novels, which debunked religious hypocrisy and decried social inequity, also rankled Victorian audiences who found such criticism especially insupportable from the pen of a woman. “Conventionality is not morality,” Brontë admonished her critics in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. “Self-righteousness is not religion.” One reviewer, Elizabeth Rigby, branded Jane Eyre a “dangerous” book, calling its heroine “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit,” and condemning the novel’s “murmuring against God’s appointment” and its “proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man.” The review culminates in an ad hominem attack that impugns Brontë’s character as a woman. “If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex,” Rigby pronounced (Allot, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, pp. 109, 111).

  In the face of vicious public attacks such as this one, Gaskell felt that she had a “grave duty” to protect her friend’s reputation—both literary and personal (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 245). As part of her recuperative task, Gaskell cannot emphasize enough the strange “otherness” of the Yorkshire people Brontë lived among, maintaining that even an inhabitant of neighboring Lancashire is struck by their “peculiar force of character” (p. 18). “For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë,” Gaskell explains, “it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others,
that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed” (p. 18). Gaskell characterizes Brontë as “one who has led a wild and struggling and isolated life,—seeing few but plain and outspoken Northerns, unskilled in the euphuisms which assist the polite world to skim over the mention of vice” (p. 297).

  To some degree Gaskell’s prejudice reflects Brontë’s own, and her defense takes its cue from Brontë’s “Biographical Notice” of her sisters, which prefaced the posthumous edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that Brontë prepared for her publisher, Smith, Elder and Company in 1850. The great theme of the “Biographical Notice” is of contagion. Brontë describes her sisters as unconscious victims of what they observed, thus finding an external explanation for the disturbing elements of their work. Emily was contaminated not through direct contact with the Haworth locals, but through their lore, which unconsciously shaped her imagination. “In listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress,” Brontë explains. She maintains that Emily “did not know what she had done” in writing Wuthering Heights. Anne “hated her work,” Brontë insists, but “believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail” of the dissolute characters she drew as a warning to others (p. 282). Brontë characterizes both of her sisters as unwilling scribes, whose subjects were forced upon them by the exigencies of life.

  Similarly, Gaskell maintains that Brontë was “utterly unconscious” of “what was, by some, deemed coarse in her writings,” and she urges the reader to “remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be” (p. 425). The offending elements of Jane Eyre are copied from life, Gaskell explains, while the scenes drawn from Brontë’s “own imagination... stand out in exquisite relief from the deep shadows and wayward lines” of the “wild and grotesque” scenes of life she witnessed around her (p. 244).

  Gaskell locates the most acute source of moral contagion within the parsonage itself, however, in the shape of Brontë’s brother, Branwell, whose struggle with alcoholism and opium addiction resulted in premature death. “Think of her home,” Gaskell exhorts the reader who would fault Brontë for want of delicacy, “and the black shadow of remorse lying over one in it, till his very brain was mazed, and his gifts and his life were lost” (p. 245). In Gaskell’s estimation Branwell’s sins range from denying his sisters’ dream of independence—his evident debauchery being the reason they were unable to start a school at the parsonage—to the more strained claim that the “many bitter noiseless tears” Brontë shed on his account weakened her eyesight (p. 219).

  The Brontës viewed Branwell as the most promising artist among them. Accordingly, they were prepared to make sacrifices to forward his education. Brontë’s letters evidence the pressure she and her sisters felt to relieve their father of the financial burden of their maintenance so that he could support Branwell’s attendance at the Royal Academy of Arts. All three sisters went out as governesses, although they were ill suited to the work, which Brontë termed “‘slavery’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell generalizes the plight of the Brontë sisters with a feminist apostrophe: “These are not the first sisters who have laid their lives as a sacrifice before their brother’s idolized wish. Would to God they might be the last who met with such a miserable return!” (p. 107). Branwell never entered the Royal Academy; the reason why is unknown. Instead, he cycled through a series of jobs, ending in a position analogous to that of his sisters, as tutor to a prominent local family, the Robinsons of Thorp Green Hall.

  Evasions

  While at Thorp Green Hall, Branwell allegedly engaged in a sexual relationship with Lydia Robinson, the wife of his employer. No proof has been found, but Branwell’s assertions that Robinson was one “whom I must, till death, call my wife” (Branwell Brontë to Francis Grundy, October 1845; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 367) and his dismissal in the summer of 1845 for behavior that his employer characterized as “bad beyond expression” are suggestive (p. 222). If Gaskell melodramatically represents the Brontë sisters as victims of Branwell’s profligacy, she is even more extravagant in absolving Branwell from responsibility for the Robinson affair. Gaskell rests most of the blame with Robinson, noting that this “case presents the reverse of the usual features; the man became the victim.” In Gaskell’s telling Branwell is merely one of a number of “innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door” (p. 223).

  Not surprisingly, Robinson, who had remarried and become Lady Scott by the time the Life appeared, threatened Gaskell with a libel suit. All unsold copies of the Life were pulled from the shelves, a revised edition issued, and a public retraction printed in the Times (May 26, 1857). This injured Gaskell’s personal credibility and raised questions about the factual accuracy of the Life generally: It begged the question of why Gaskell should place such emphasis on an episode tangential to Brontë’s history.

  As one contemporary reviewer observed, because the Life was written so soon after Brontë’s death and many of those concerned in it were living, the text is fissured by suppressions and evasions that occasion us “to read between the lines” (Easson, p. 381). The Robinson episode is one. Gaskell had to provide a compelling reason for Brontë’s aggravated depression at the end of her stay in Brussels and after her return to Haworth in January 1844, which resulted from her unrequited attachment to a married man, Constantin Heger. Heger was Brontë’s literature teacher at the school she attended in Brussels, which was run by his wife. Brontë was later employed there as an English teacher. Heger’s growing awareness of the intensity of Brontë’s feelings caused him to withdraw from her, and her relationship with Mme. Heger, her employer, simmered with so much suppressed hostility that it became too uncomfortable for Brontë to remain. Gaskell provides an earlier, inaccurate date for Branwell’s disgrace and freights the episode with excessive narrative energy in order to cover the trace of Brontë’s more innocent but, to Gaskell, equally shocking secret.

  When Gaskell traveled to Brussels in May 1856 “to have a look at” the Hegers, as part of her research for the biography, Madame Heger refused to meet with her upon finding that she was Brontë’s friend, but Constantin Heger shared with Gaskell, on the condition of confidentiality, a series of obsessive letters Brontë had sent him after she left the school (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 271a). Although Gaskell was aware of the entire correspondence and may have read it, it was Heger who made the extracts from Brontë’s letters that appear in the Life, giving a sense of their intensity, but notably excising Brontë’s alternately masochistic and angry demands for attention that his silence provoked.

  Even before Heger shared his cache of letters with Gaskell, she had her suspicions that he was the model for Paul Emanuel, the love interest in Villette (1853). Brontë’s attachment to Heger has generally been discussed in the language of romantic infatuation (a notable exception is Lyndall Gordon’s treatment in Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life), but her passion is perhaps best understood as a product of the intellectual and imaginative connection she forged with her teacher, who represented a world of letters that Brontë felt exiled from on her return to Haworth. “ ‘I feel as if we were all buried here,’ ” she complained to Nussey after her return, “ ‘I long to travel; to work; to live a life of action’ ” (p. 218).

  Gaskell’s treatment of Brontë’s connection to Heger, while evasive on some level, does confront the relationship in aspects important to a critical assessment of Brontë’s development as a writer. Gaskell understood that curiosity seekers would read the Life as a key to the novels. As one reviewer put it, “It was natural to wonder whence came this astonishing knowledge of the workings of fiery passion. Did she write from memory—or was she taught by the inspiration of a creative mind?” This reviewer came away with the erroneous impression that “Miss Brontë had, so far as is known to her biographer, never felt anything like love when
she wrote Jane Eyre” (Easson, p. 377).

  In creating this impression, Gaskell may break her contract with the reader to present the details of the life of the woman, but she provides a professional analysis of the influence Heger had on Brontë’s work. It is for this reason that Gaskell spends so much time discussing Heger’s pedagogical technique. Nor does Gaskell shrink completely from exposing the emotional content of that bond, as she includes the melancholy letter in which Brontë confesses to Nussey: “I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me” (p. 209).

  The full force of Brontë’s impassioned letters to Heger is muted, but Gaskell preserves Brontë’s great desire, to write a novel and dedicate it to her teacher:“I would write a book and dedicate it to my literature master, to the only master I have ever had—to you, Monsieur! I have told you often in French how much I respect you, how indebted I am to your kindness and your instruction. I would like to say it one time in English. But that cannot be; there’s no use thinking about it. A literary career is closed to me” (p. 219; my translation).

  Brontë’s despair registers as anxiety about her ability to make her voice heard as a published author. Heger heard that voice and knew its power, reflecting its worth back to Brontë in his comments on her devoirs (composition exercises). Brontë’s increasing desperation at his silence after she leaves Brussels stemmed perhaps not from desire for his affection, but from a need for his encouragement to write.