The life of Charlotte Brontë
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Another relationship that receives evasive treatment in the Life is Brontë’s friendship with her publisher, George Smith, which had an exuberant quality unlike any other in Brontë’s adult life. Brontë’s letters to Smith dance with a boisterous, good-humored sarcasm not fully displayed in the Life, as Smith withheld the most playful of them from Gaskell, claiming they were too “purely personal” to be “generally interesting” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 271a).
In Villette Lucy Snowe describes the penchant that Dr. John, who was inspired by Smith, has for making life exciting: “Of every door which shut in an object worth seeing... he seemed to possess the ‘Open! Sesame.’ ” Similarly, Smith brought to life some of Brontë’s fantasies. He arranged a visit to the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons. He took her to the chapel at St. James’s Palace to see her childhood idol, the Duke of Wellington, at Sunday worship. He initiated a trip to Scotland to visit the home of her favorite novelist, Sir Walter Scott. He introduced Brontë to William Makepeace Thackeray, the contemporary author she most admired. As a lasting memory, Smith presented Brontë with portraits of her heroes, Wellington and Thackeray, and to complete the fantasy, he commissioned one of Brontë, by George Richmond, a leading portraitist of the day, thus enshrining her among her worthies.
Gaskell discovered evidence in the Brontë-Nussey correspondence, which she suppresses in the Life, of a romantic attachment between Brontë and her publisher. Nussey, who did not approve of Brontë’s traveling to Scotland with the unmarried Smith and his sister, an event that Gaskell neatly sidesteps in the Life, asked her to qualify their relationship. Brontë breezily reassures Ellen: “My six or eight years of seniority to say nothing of lack of all pretension to beauty &c. are a perfect safeguard—I should not in the least fear to go with him to China” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, June 20, 1850; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 419).
Six months later, however, Brontë adopts a slightly darker tone when she concedes that were “there no vast barrier of age, fortune, &c. there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which now are impossible. If men and women married because they like each others’ temper, look, conversation, nature and so on ... the chance you allude to might be admitted as a chance—but other reasons regulate matrimony—reasons of convenience, of connection, of money.” Brontë is also now reluctant to travel with Smith, who had proposed a trip to Germany. “That hint about the Rhine disturbs me,” Brontë tells Nussey, “I am not made of stone—and what is excitement to him—is fever to me” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, January 20, 1851; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 557).
Commentators make much of the chillingly terse note of congratulation Brontë sent Smith when she received news of his forthcoming marriage: “In great happiness as in great grief, words of sympathy should be few. Accept my mead of congratulation” (Charlotte Brontë to George Smith, December 10, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 213). Brontë’s displeasure with Smith may have been compounded by what she perceived to be a professional, not a personal slight. Significantly, she cools her relationship with William Smith Williams, the firm’s literary adviser, at this time as well. “Do not trouble yourself to select or send any more books. These courtesies must cease one day,” she writes, “and I would rather give them up than wear them out” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, December 6, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 212). She had expected no less than £700 pounds for Villette, and Smith offered only £500, the same sum he had paid for Jane Eyre and Shirley, respectively. To place this in context, Smith paid Gaskell £1,000 for the Life. It was on the basis of Jane Eyre’s success that Smith’s reputation grew and that the firm attracted other high-profile clients, Thackeray among them. A growing sense of professional dissatisfaction may have prompted Brontë to withdraw from amicable relations with the men of Smith, Elder and Company. Brontë’s retreat also coincides with her decision to marry, suggesting perhaps that she saw a new vocation becoming evident.
Courtship and Marriage
Gaskell prefaces her discussion of Brontë’s courtship and marriage with a caveat. “As I draw nearer to the years so recently closed, it becomes impossible for me to write with the same fulness of detail as I have hitherto,” Gaskell explains, signaling that she will offer a version of the truth, but not the whole truth (p. 440). Gaskell keeps to the letter of her law in portraying the tortuous history of Brontë’s courtship with Nicholls by citing Patrick’s opposition to the match as its only impediment, and not registering any of Brontë’s own ambivalence. Brontë feared that her future husband’s views on religious and social issues might prove too narrow to suit her, and she worried that he would be unsympathetic to her literary concerns. “My own objections arise from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feelings, tastes—principles,” Brontë confessed to Nussey (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, December 18, 1852; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 95). Gaskell represents Brontë’s initial refusal of Nicholls as a duty to a father who appears at once tyrannical and dependent. Gaskell observes how “quietly and modestly” Brontë, “on whom such hard judgments had been passed by ignorant reviewers,” received Nicholls’s “vehement, passionate declaration of love,” and how “unselfishly” she refused it in deference to her father’s wishes (p. 421).
Gaskell attempts to gloss over Patrick’s actual objections to the match, that Nicholls was socially beneath his daughter and his income too modest, by saying that he “disapproved of marriages” generally. Brontë’s letters say otherwise, however. Patrick did encourage James Taylor’s suit. Taylor, who was a manager of Smith, Elder and Company, is not named as a correspondent throughout the Life, although Gaskell quotes liberally from letters Brontë wrote to him both before and after rejecting him. Gaskell doubtless intended to protect Brontë from the charge that she encouraged a proposal that she did not accept. By including mention of Taylor’s proposal as well as those from two other suitors that Brontë received before Nicholls presented himself, Gaskell makes clear that she remained single by choice, not fate, scorning to marry simply to escape “the stigma of an old maid,” as she told her first suitor, Henry Nussey, Ellen’s brother (Charlotte Brontë to Henry Nussey, March 5, 1839; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, pp. 185-186). Brontë’s three previous rejections also give a consequent weight to her decision to accept Nicholls.
Nicholls’s persistence assured Brontë of the intensity of his passion, something she feared he lacked, and his promise not to seek an independent living but to remain at Haworth as Patrick’s curate relieved her father’s fear of separation. “By degrees Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter’s marriage,” Gaskell reports, suppressing the fact that she may have directly contributed to this change of heart by secretly arranging for Nicholls to receive a pension that increased his income, something that Brontë never discovered (p. 440; The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letters 168, 195).
Brontë’s fears about compatibility proved to be no more than customary premarital jitters. “My husband is not a poet or a poetical man—and one of my grand doubts before marriage was about ‘congenial tastes’ and so on,” Brontë wrote during her honeymoon, having realized that Nicholls offered a connection that was “a thousand times better than any half sort of psuedo sympathy” (Charlotte Brontë to Catherine Winkworth, July 27, 1854; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, pp. 279-280). If Brontë was personally happy in her choice, she was equally happy to have provided assistance and companionship for her father through her marriage: “ ‘Papa has taken no duty since we returned; and each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice, I feel comforted to think that this marriage secured papa good aid in his old age’ ” (p. 448). Nicholls kept his promise “to comfort and sustain [Patrick’s] declining years,” (p. 444) living with him until his death in 1861.
Gaskell loads Brontë’s marriage with recuperative possibility and
expresses the hope that “the slight astringencies of her character... would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace” (p. 447). Brontë saw things similarly, if more pragmatically and with less certainty. “If true domestic happiness replace Fame—the exchange
Patrick Brontë
The portrait of Brontë’s father that emerges from the Life is one of public benefactor and domestic tyrant. While Gaskell extols Patrick’s “diligent” attention to his parishioners in his role as Haworth’s perpetual curate, his tolerance of nonconformists, and a freedom from dogmatism that enables him “fearlessly” to take “whatever side in local or national politics appeared to him right,” it is hard to view these laudable qualities through the dense fog of anecdote cataloguing his “volcanic wrath.” Most of these details, such as his burning his children’s colored boots and slashing his wife’s silk gown because he thought them too “gay and luxurious,” were provided by an unreliable source and omitted, at Patrick’s request, in the revised third edition of the Life. Gaskell attributes Patrick’s peculiarities, such as his alleged propensity to work off his rage by “firing pistols out of the back-door in rapid succession,” to his “passionate, Irish nature,” and insists that she mentions these instances of “eccentricity in the father” not to “judge them,” but because they are necessary “for a right understanding of the life of his daughter” (pp. 45, 46).
But the Life is internally inconsistent on Patrick’s domestic character. His description in a letter of intervening as “ ‘arbitrator’ ” when the “ ‘little plays’ ” his children invented erupted into impassioned political debate (p. 49), his initiation of a game in which he offered his children masks to encourage them to speak their opinions more “ ‘boldly,’ ” and his own testimony that he discussed “the leading topics of the day” with his young daughter Maria “with as much freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person” work to undermine Gaskell’s claim that Patrick was a “considerably restrained” father who was not “naturally fond of children” (pp. 37, 41).
Gaskell paints Patrick as a misanthropic and unsympathetic father who neglected his growing daughters’ health, education, and social needs. Patrick did see to it that all of his daughters were offered formal education in a period when it was not considered a right or a necessity. Furthermore, his unconventional approach to their education, whether through benign neglect, as Gaskell argues, or from a more active principle, worked to draw out Brontë’s talent. She was allowed unfettered access to Patrick’s library, and she was not barred from reading authors not considered appropriate fare for young women at the time. Among these was Lord Byron, whose version of Romanticism influenced Brontë greatly. The one area in which Patrick did exercise censorship was in burning his wife’s collection of the “Lady’s Magazines,” because they contained “foolish love stories” that he did not like his daughters to read (Charlotte Brontë to Hartley Coleridge, December 10, 1840; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 240).
Gaskell’s antipathy for Patrick may be explained in part by her first meeting him at a time of crisis in the Brontë household, when father and daughter had reached an uneasy stalemate after Patrick forbade Brontë to accept Nicholls’s offer of marriage. “He was very polite and agreeable to me,” Gaskell commented on Patrick’s demeanor during her visit, adding that she was nevertheless, “sadly afraid of him in my inmost soul; for I caught a glance of his stern eyes over his spectacles at Miss Brontë once or twice which made me know my man” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 166). Both Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, whose friendship with Brontë dated back to their days together at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, thought Patrick overly controlling.
Patrick did not seem to sense Gaskell’s unease. He encouraged her friendship with his daughter, writing shortly after Gaskell’s visit: “I think that you and my daughter are congenial spirits, and that a little intercourse between you might under the strange vicissitudes and frequent trials of this mortal life... be productive of pleasure and profit to you both” (Patrick Brontë to Gaskell, September 15, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 193).
Sister Authors?
As two of the most famous writers of their day, Brontë and Gaskell shared an exceptional bond. Although Brontë’s fame now eclipses Gaskell’s, in their day Gaskell was perhaps the more generally admired of the two. Modern reversal of Victorian valuation may have more to do with narrative mode than choice of subject matter; Gaskell’s sentimentalism fell out of favor, while Brontë’s psychological realism finds greater and greater resonance with successive generations of readers. But this imbalance is now being redressed, as critics take a new interest in the social significance of Gaskell’s work. Patrick Brontë praised the biography as “every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another” (Patrick Brontë to Gaskell, July 30, 1857; quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 808). Similarly, a reviewer remarked that the Life benefited from insights that could only have been provided by “a kindred spirit, a fellow-worker in the same vineyard, a sister genius, and a loving-friend” (Easson, p. 388).
Although it is a quaint notion to picture Brontë and Gaskell as toilers in the same “vineyard,” the true extent of their literary sisterhood is debatable. Gaskell was a noted “condition of England” novelist, whose fiction was a vehicle for education and reform, although her work is more nuanced than this rubric suggests, and she moved away from this model in later novels, as in the posthumously published Wives and Daughters (1866). She gives voice to the concerns of disenfranchised workers in her industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), and, in her most controversial novel, Ruth (1853), she depicts the confluence of social and economic forces that lead to the seduction of a young woman. Gaskell allows Ruth to survive her shame and lead a useful life for a time, only to impose a penitential ending in which Ruth dies in an act of self-sacrifice. While aspects of Gaskell’s work may seem overly sentimental to today’s readers, she leverages emotion to build the reader sympathy necessary to open up settled moral questions to a new angle of vision. How do we define criminality? Is stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child more immoral than legalized institutional thefts such as the exploitation of labor and the derogation of personal dignity? Gaskell asserts in the preface to Mary Barton that she is interested in exploring “the state of feeling” on topical issues, not in debating economic facts and figures. She does so, in part, to stay within the proscribed sphere of her sex, but also because she wants her reader to learn to sympathize, not to theorize.
Gaskell viewed fiction writing as a natural extension of the missionary or “rescue work” that she performed as the wife of a Unitarian minister in the great manufacturing hub of Manchester. (For details on Gaskell’s
missionary work, see Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell:A Habit of Stories.) This is not to say that her books were traditionalist; Ruth was burned (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). But she does at times undercut the full radical potential of the sympathy she awakens by imposing a recuperative ending. Brontë objected to Ruth’s death, for example, on the grounds that it diminishes the novel’s efficacy as an agent of change: “ ‘Such a book may restore hope and energy to many who thought they had forfeited their right to both.... Yet hear my protest! Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping?’ ” (p. 406). Significantly, Brontë encases her political critique in an affective one, perhaps aware that she was treading on sensitive ground.
There is a similar hesitancy, unlike Brontë’s forthright and assured voice when addressing critical questions in letters to Williams, for example, in the rhetorical question she puts to Gaskell about the pressure she might encounter to conform to proscribed standards and beliefs in her work: “Do you, who have so many friends,—so large a circle of acquaintance,—find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman, uninfluenced or swayed by the consciousness of how your work might affect other minds.... Does no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing soul? Don’t answer this question; it is not intended to be answered” (pp. 433-434). Although Brontë is careful to bestow the ladylike designation “sweet associations,” upon them, she is prodding Gaskell to reassess the ties that may bind her to a conventionalism she might not adhere to in her “secret and clear-seeing soul.” Brontë pushes Gaskell to confront her own limitations as a writer here, and urges her toward a greater degree of verisimilitude.