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 Gaskelclass="underline" 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.
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.