To the advantage of both Brontë and Gaskell, the Life has outlived the topical scandal that plagued its initial publication to become one of the most widely read biographies written in English.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
HENRY FOTHERGILL CHORLEY
The story of a woman’s life unfolded in this book is calculated to make the old feel young and the young old. Persons who have been conversant with society and manners as they existed in the remote corners of England within the century will feel themselves strangely recalled to the narrow homes, the grim prejudices, the few pleasures and privileges belonging to a period of heavy taxation, costly literature, and limited intercourse, by the picture of a provincial parsonage and its inmates here set before them. Some of those, on the other hand, who are bursting with life, and brimming with creative power, may feel palsied (as it were by some cold prophecy) while they follow the record of a career of self-denial and struggle, sustained to the last with courage, principle, and genius, but without hope. Nevertheless, a true tale of what may be achieved in spite of disabilities, be the facts ever so cheerless, let the pilgrim’s lot have been cast on ever so rugged a road, let his cup have been ever so full of the waters of bitterness, can hardly be followed to its close without some strength being gained for the reader. By all, this book will be read with interest. As a work of Art, we do not recollect a life of a woman by a woman so well executed....
Protracted life and success, and increased experience with what is best in society (not what is most convenient in observance), might have ripened, and mellowed, and smoothed the creations of this singular novelist without destroying their charm of force and individuality. But conjecture stops at the grave-side. At the time when “the silver lining of the cloud” began to show itself, when domestic cherishing and prosperity seemed to await her after so many hard, dark, cruel years, the end came. All this is gently and sadly told by Mrs. Gaskell, with whom the task has been a labour of love (a little, also, of defence),—and who, we repeat, has produced one of the best biographies of a woman by a woman we can recall to mind.
—from an unsigned review in The Athenaeum (April 4, 1857)
THE SPECTATOR
Besides the actual poverty of incident that characterizes this life, the materials for largely illustrating it, such as it was, even in its later period, and still more in its growing time, are wanting. Very little correspondence can have passed between the Misses Brontë and other people, and of that little less had been preserved. Their father, who has survived them, is very old and infirm, and little more than vague general recollections seem to have been obtained from him. Charlotte does not appear to have been communicative about herself and her proceedings while she lived, and she lived in such retirement and isolation that no one now seems able to describe minutely what she left unrecorded. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, it is impossible to read through Mrs. Gaskell’s two volumes without a strong conviction that Charlotte Brontë was a woman as extraordinary by her character as by her genius. She possessed in a remarkable degree, not only the poetical imagination shown in her works, but an unconquerable will, and a sense of duty to which everything in her life was subordinated....
Those who can be powerfully interested by character developing itself without striking outward incident—who can follow the drama of the inner life in a lonely parsonage, where three eccentric girls, and an eccentric father, with an equally eccentric old Yorkshire servant, for the most part lead an existence of which one day is precisely in its outward aspect like every other—will find in Mrs. Gaskell’s account of Charlotte Brontë and her family one of the profoundest tragedies of modern life, if tragedy be, as we believe it to be, the contest of humanity with inexorable fate—the anguish and the strife through which the spirit nerves itself for a grander sphere—the martyr’s pang, and the saint’s victory.
—April 4, 1857
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
I have just finished your “Life of Charlotte Bronte”—which has afforded exquisite delight to my evenings on this remote patch of rock, round which the Atlantic roars, and dashes like a troop of lions, making a solitude almost equal to Haworth moors—quite equal, as far as any society I get here. If I had any public means of expressing my high sense of the skill, delicacy and artistic power of your Biography, I should not trouble you with this note. But it is a law of the literary organization that it must relieve itself in expression, and I discharge my emotion through the penny post; at least, such of it as was not discharged in wet eyes and swelling heart, as chapter after chapter was read.
The book will, I think, create a deep and permanent impression; for it not only presents a vivid picture of a life noble and sad, full of encouragement and healthy teaching, a lesson in duty and self-reliance; it also, thanks to its artistic power, makes us familiar inmates of an interior so strange, so original in its individual elements and so picturesque in its externals—it paints for us at once the psychological drama and the scenic accessories with so much vividness—that fiction has nothing more wild, touching, and heart-strengthening to place above it.
The early part is a triumph for you; the rest a monument for your friend. One learns to love Charlotte, and deeply to respect her. Emily has a singular fascination for me—probably because I have a passion for lions and savage animals, and she was une bête fauve in power, splendour, and wildness. What an episode that death of hers! and how touching is Charlotte’s search for the bit of heather which the glazed eyes could not recognize at last! And what a bit of the true religion of home is the whole biography!
—from a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell (April 15, 1857)
ENEAS SWEETLAND DALLAS
Women ought to be good biographers. They have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance. Mrs. Gaskell, we regret to say, has, in the present work, so employed her talent that she appears too much in the latter light—as a gossip and a gad-about. There was not much to say of Charlotte Brontë, better known as Currer Bell, but the biographer was determined to say a great deaclass="underline" she therefore makes a pilgrimage to every spot where her heroine was ever known to have set her foot. First of all, she devotes a chapter to Haworth, counting all the rooms and all the windows in the parsonage. The next chapter she devotes to a description of the character of Yorkshiremen, who appear to be the most unsocial beings on the face of the earth. In the third chapter she hies away to Cornwall, gives a long account of the customs of Penzance, Mrs. Brontë’s birthplace; favours us with some of this lady’s letters to her husband in the days of their courtship; informs us how Mr. Brontë used to saw off the backs of chairs, fire pistols through doors when he was angry, tear his wife’s silk dress to shreds, and every day of his life eat his dinner all alone by himself With amazing rapidity she then relates the birth of half-a-dozen children, kills off Mrs. Brontë, and sends Charlotte to school. Here comes a grand opportunity for describing the school at Cowanbridge—how it was started, where it was situated, who were the managers, what were the rules, how the girls were fed. Then comes another school at Roehead, and the biographer writes a gazetteer of the neighbourhood from the days of the Stuarts downwards. So she dwells on every incident. Miss Brontë, in passing through London, went to the Chapter Coffeehouse: Mrs. Gaskell, therefore, gives us the history of that tavern, carefully describes the different rooms, makes us familiar with the waiters, and enlarges on the kind of custom on which the house depends. Miss Brontë went to a school at Brussels: her biographer, therefore, beginning with the thirteenth century, writes the history of the Rue d’Isabelle, in which the school is situated, quotes long pages of Charlotte’s French exercises, with all her teacher’s corrections; is great on the subject of the school hours, the kind of rolls for supper, the number of lamps in the refectory, and presents us with an inventory of the bedroom furniture. All this information of the Dame Quickly sort, with which every chapter abounds, Mrs. Gaskell has seasoned with as much petty scandal as might suffice for half-a-dozen biographies.... The biographer even tries to persuade herself that the sad history of Branwell’s intrigue, every word of which she has since been obliged ignominiously to retract, is given to the public, not at all from any love of scandal, but in the Christian hope that it may meet the eye, and bring repentance to the heart, of the cruel lady who survives, and who is said to mix in the best society of the metropolis. Without pretending to half so high an opinion of Currer Bell as her biographer professes to entertain, we respect her too much not to condemn such an outrage upon her memory, committed in the name of friendship and sky-high religion. If it was impossible to write the biography without entering into these details, then it ought never to have been written. Whoever could speak in this vein of Currer Bell and her relations, has no genuine sympathy with that retiring nature who shrank from popular observation. Mrs. Gaskell is, indeed, lavish of her sympathy; but it is of the patronising apologetic kind, feeling for rather than with the sufferer; crushing her with condescension, overpowering her with affection, and rejoicing itself with a copious discharge of those cheap protestations which Sairey Gamp, over her brown teapot, might offer to Betsy Prig. If we do Mrs. Gaskell any injustice, we ask her pardon, and we dare say that in reality she is very different from the author of these volumes, who appears in the character of a shallow, showy woman, fond of her own prattle, and less intent on describing Currer Bell (even if it be by saying that she is “half a head shorter than I am”), than on speaking of “myself,” “my husband,” “our little girls,” “an aunt of mine,” “a friend of mine,” “a visit I paid,” “a letter I received,” “what I partly knew,” and “what my feelings were.”