The life of Charlotte Brontë

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  Brontë’s social impulse is harder to characterize than is Gaskell’s, which is what may account for Gaskell’s ambivalence about her work. (Critics have begun to consider the feminist implications of Brontë’s novels relatively recently.) “I often wish to say something about the ‘condition of women’ question,” she told Williams, “but it is one respecting which so much ‘cant’ has been talked, that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it. It is true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked—but where or how could another be opened?” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).

  Jane Eyre registers the restlessness and dissatisfaction a governess feels with her lot in life: “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do” (p. 96). Responding to the charge that the heroine of Villette “ ‘may be thought morbid and weak,’ ” Brontë retorts, “ ‘anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid’ ” (p. 416). Brontë does not isolate Lucy Snowe as a case study of neurosis; rather, she puts her “morbidity” in perspective, pointing to its cultural causes, above all the limited range for the exercise of her intellect in dignified employment.

  Teaching was virtually the only respectable profession open to women of Brontë’s social standing, and teachers’ salaries were generally not sufficient to render them truly independent. Gaskell does not shy from registering Brontë’s disdain for that kind of work: “ ‘I am no teacher; to look on me in that light is to mistake me. To teach is not my vocation. What I am, it is useless to say. Those whom it concerns feel and find it out,’ ” Brontë told Nussey (p. 326). As a teacher at Miss Wooler’s school, Brontë chafed against the uniformity of her employment: “ ‘Nothing but teach, teach, teach, from morning to night’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell qualifies Brontë’s time there as “tedious and monotonous,” but in the journal Brontë kept at this time she describes it more pejoratively, as a term of imprisonment: “ ‘Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare-walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?’ ” (Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 39). While the Life does register the depth of Brontë’s anguish during this period, it casts her professional identity crisis of 1835-1837 as a religious crisis, relying as it does on Brontë’s letters to Nussey in which she uses the cryptic language of transgression and of longing for “ ‘reconciliation to God’ ” to describe her angst (p. 113). But the journal entries from the same period tell a different story—one of frustrated genius—of longing to “write gloriously” but being condemned to teach “Dolts” and “asses” (The Brontës, pp. 39-40).

  The Brontë-Nussey Correspondence

  Some argue that the Life suffers from Gaskell’s heavy reliance on Brontë’s letters to Nussey, who is often characterized as a provincial and conventional person with whom Brontë did not discuss her literary concerns. This view of Nussey is based in part on a letter in which Brontë seems to slight her when she describes her as “no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl” who is “without romance,” and whose clumsy attempts to read poetry aloud make Brontë want to stop her ears. The letter contains the passionate avowal, however, that “no new friend, however lofty and profound in intellect—not Miss Martineau herself—could be to me what Ellen is” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, January 3, 1850; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 323).

  In the early days of their friendship, Brontë trusted a mutual friend, the independent and unconventional Mary Taylor, to understand her better than Nussey did. This correspondence, sadly, is lost. Taylor burned all of Brontë’s letters but the one in which she describes her first visit to her publishers, Smith, Elder and Company. In an 1836 letter to Nussey, Brontë told her, “I sat down and wrote to you such a note as I ought to have written to none but M. Taylor who is nearly as mad as myself, when I glanced it over it occurred to me that Ellen’s calm eye would look at this with scorn, so I determined to concoct some production more fit for the inspection of common-sense” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, September 26, 1836; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 151). If Brontë’s personification of Nussey as “common-sense,” seems dismissive, her revelation that she has written two letters entails an appeal, an embedded question: Would Ellen scorn such a production? Brontë indirectly seeks Nussey’s permission for greater freedom of expression in their correspondence.

  The desired intimacy was achieved during Brontë’s tenure at Miss Wooler’s school. “ ‘Don’t deceive yourself by imagining I have a bit of real goodness about me,’ ” a self-loathing Brontë enigmatically warned Nussey. “ ‘If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up ... you would pity and I dare say despise me’ ” (p. 112). The source of Brontë’s anxiety is the fear, which she veils, that her compulsive engagement with the imaginary world of the juvenile Glasstown and Angria Saga that she and Branwell coauthored was socially unacceptable for a young woman. Brontë’s depression stems not only from the fact that she feels forced to teach at the expense of writing, but also from a corollary effort to abandon the lurid fantasy writing of her youth in favor of realist fiction. Brontë expresses herself in letters from this period with a vehemence that might have repelled a truly conventional person, and emerges from this dark spell calling Nussey “ ‘her comforter’ ” (p. 127).

  As their friendship deepened, Brontë was more authentic and unguarded with Nussey than with any other correspondent. “ ‘I write to you freely,’ ” Brontë explained in the difficult summer following her sisters’ deaths, “ ‘because I believe you will hear me with moderation’ ” (p. 314). While it is true that letters to Nussey are evidence that Brontë “was one to study the path of duty well,” as Gaskell says (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 267), we can also understand why Brontë’s husband deemed her letters to this friend “lucifer matches” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, October 24, 1854; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 295). Nicholls understood that Brontë’s publicity would make these expressive letters of interest to a wider audience, and consequently made it a condition of their correspondence that Nussey burn them. The purportedly conventional Nussey, notably, did not comply with Nicholls’s request. This correspondence, which captures Brontë under the stress of self-development, provides a natural character arc for Brontë as heroine of Gaskell’s novelistic Life.

  “The Woman Question”

  Brontë did prefer teaching in a school to submitting to the “ ‘slavery’ ” of being a governess in a private family (p. 115). Gaskell captures with vivid intensity the painful alienation Brontë felt during her years as a governess. The liminal position of governesses, who were suspended between classes, being neither equal to their masters nor truly servants, had the effect of negating both the value and the difficulty of their work. Brontë’s remarks that she would rather be a “ ‘housemaid’ ” than a governess, and that she “ ‘could like to work in a mill,’ ” may show signs of class insensitivity, but her hyperbole constitutes a critique of the value structure of genteel employment (pp. 134, 138). To make employment suitable for young ladies, the issue of labor had to be politely elided, the compensation nominal.

  As much as she detested working at Margaret Wooler’s school, Brontë looked up to Wooler because she managed to contrive an independent life by running a school. “ ‘There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her way through life,’ ” Brontë told her (p. 232). When Williams asked Brontë’s advice about educating his daughters, Brontë urged him to “give their existence some object” in case they did not marry. “An education secured is an advantage gained—a pricel
ess advantage. Come what may—it is a step towards independency—and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency,” she cautions: Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career.... How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? in that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope sustains me still.... I wish every woman in England had also a hope and a motive. Alas! there are many old maids who have neither (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, July 3, 1849; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 227 ).

  When Brontë speaks generally about the lot of single women, she names economic dependency as their “great curse,” but in atomizing her own condition, she places emphasis not on her material condition, but on her intellectual and psychological needs.

  Gaskell, too, was sensitive to “the trials of many single women, who waken up some morning to the sudden feeling of the purposelessness (is there such a word) of their lives.” “I think I see everyday how women, deprived of their natural duties as wives & mothers, must look out for other duties if they wish to be at peace,” Gaskell explains to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Gaskell’s formulation of the problem, that women are appointed by natural order to perform specific duties, differs only marginally from Brontë’s more practical view that a career would be a superfluity for a married woman: “When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident—when her destiny isolates her—I suppose she must do what she can—live as she can” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).

  Gaskell refines her position in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, an artist. “One thing is clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life,” Gaskell muses, coming to the conclusion that “assuredly a blending of the two is desirable. (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean), which you will say it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68). Gaskell’s awkward answer in the Life is to divide Brontë’s existence into “two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled” (p. 272). While Gaskell’s ambivalence about female duty certainly registers here, the fact that she labels the currents “parallel” suggests that she saw the division not as a subordination of one role to the other, but rather as an uneasy coexistence of the two. In addition, Gaskell’s careful delineation between Brontë’s public and private personae has the effect of preserving her professionalism. Thackeray angered Brontë by referring to her publicly as “Jane Eyre,” a conflation that she felt effaced her artistry. She was not Jane Eyre; she had created Jane Eyre.

  Gaskell conducted her own literary career with uncompromising professionalism, famously locking horns with Charles Dickens over creative differences when she wrote for his periodical Household Words. But her ambivalence about Brontë’s work persisted well into their friendship. “The difference between Miss Brontë and me,” Gaskell explained to a friend, “is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing, and out of her life; and my books are so far better than I am that I often feel... as if I were a hypocrite” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Both Brontë and Gaskell saw their work as therapeutic. Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in an attempt to exorcize her grief over the death of an infant son. Brontë found relief from loneliness in the life of her imagination after the deaths of her sisters. “ ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking... its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God, who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession,’ ” Brontë told Williams (p. 320).

  Where Brontë sees writing as a form of solace and pleasure, Gaskell loads it with the corrective function of “normalizing” the self by working out unhealthy energy. Women’s participation in the “hidden world of art” is beneficial if it “keeps them from being morbid,” Gaskell believes, but if “Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is not doubt of that—and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68).

  Gaskell feared that Brontë’s desire to write and to be heard was a self-indulgence that was abnormal and not strictly womanly. As Gaskell described it in a letter to a friend, Brontë had a “ ‘desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way’ ” (p. 436).

  So desirous was Brontë of recognition, that she sent samples of her work to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate, just before her twenty-first birthday. Southey recognized her talent, but discouraged her from pursuing a literary career, saying that “ ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ ” and promising that the woman who is “ ‘engaged in her proper duties’ ” . . . is “ ‘less eager for celebrity’ ” (p. 123). Brontë’s response seemed a model of contrition, and it pleased Southey as such, but it was carefully veiled rebellion (p. 125). Her letter fairly drips with sarcasm in the guise of naive acceptance: “ ‘You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures... You kindly allow me to write... provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do ... I am afraid, sir, you think me very foolish. I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end; but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote’ ” (p. 124).

  Brontë’s original letter is not extant, but judging from her response it sounds as if she first approached Southey in an inauthentic voice that she here disowns. Brontë smartly assures Southey that she knows and does her duty She explains that as the daughter of a clergyman of limited income she has been forced out into the world as governess. “ ‘In that capacity,’ ” Brontë affirms, “ ‘I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment’s time for one dream’ ” (p. 124).

  Brontë’s avowal of domestic responsibility appeased Southey and was reassuring to Gaskell as well. Throughout the Life Gaskell anxiously repeats that Brontë did not cultivate the literary arts at the expense of the domestic ones. “Never was the claim of any duty, never was the call of another for help, neglected for an instant,” Gaskell protests (p. 246). She often counterweights discussions of Brontë’s professional engagement with examples of her fulfilling her duty to her father and other dependents. “ ‘The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest—which implies the greatest good to others,’ ” Brontë counseled Nussey when she was torn between staying at home to care for her aging mother and going out to “ ‘governess drudgery,’ ” as Brontë called it. “ ‘I recommend you to do what I am trying to do myself,’ ” Brontë adds, showing signs of a character in conflict, a struggle to be dutiful (p. 237).

  In Gaskell’s discussion of Jane Eyre’s composition history, she relates the anecdote of Brontë’s “breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing,” to “carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes” that had been missed by the aging and nearly blind Tabby (p. 246). Rather than diminishing Brontë’s stature as a professional, as some contend, these details make the reader appreciate the divided nature of her labor. Examples such as this may have won Brontë a belated
place in the hearts of Victorians who saw in her sacrifice “the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory,” but they impress today’s reader instead with the constraints under which she produced enduring literary classics (Easson, p. 381).

  Gaskell, who had to meet the needs of four growing daughters, the manifold responsibilities of a minister’s wife, and the demands of her rescue work, complained to her friend Charles Eliot Norton of the household mundanities that harassed her away from writing:If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I could write! ... But you see everybody comes to me perpetually. Now in this hour since breakfast I have had to decide on the following variety of important questions. Boiled beef—how long to boil? What perennials will do in Manchester smoke, & what colours our garden wants? Length of skirt for a gown? Salary of a nursery governess, & certain stipulations for amount of time to be left to herself (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 384).

  Although she couches it in the neutral wish for a private library, Gaskell’s point is that if she were a man, and thereby liberated from the domestic responsibilities that divide her focus, she would be a better, or at least a more prolific, writer.

  The Brontë—Gaskell correspondence evidences an ongoing conversation about women’s changing role. “ ‘Men begin to regard the position of woman in another light than they used to do,’ ” Brontë observed in her first letter to Gaskell. “ ‘They say... that the amelioration of our condition depends on ourselves. Certainly there are evils which our own efforts will best reach; but as certainly there are other evils—deep-rooted in the foundations of the social system—which no efforts of ours can touch’ ” (pp. 356—357). A letter written a month later suggests that the friends shared what was, for their day, quite a progressive position on women’s labor: “ ‘Why are you and I to think (perhaps I should rather say to feel) so exactly alike on some points that there can be no discussion between us?’ ” Brontë wrote to her future biographer. “ ‘Your words on this paper express my thoughts.’ ” The subject under discussion was Harriet Taylor’s article “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1851 and was attributed to J. S. Mill. Brontë opposed many aspects of it, but she embraced its treatment of the question of women’s employment, “ ‘especially’ ” the contention “ ‘that if there be a natural unfitness in women for men’s employment, there is no need to make laws on the subject; leave all careers open; let them try’ ” (p. 391). Oddly, although Brontë’s letter suggests that Gaskell expressed her absolute agreement (in a letter that is now lost), in a letter to J. S. Mill, written after the publication of the Life, Gaskell denies having read the article at all (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 435).