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).