In the face of vicious public attacks such as this one, Gaskell felt that she had a “grave duty” to protect her friend’s reputation—both literary and personal (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 245). As part of her recuperative task, Gaskell cannot emphasize enough the strange “otherness” of the Yorkshire people Brontë lived among, maintaining that even an inhabitant of neighboring Lancashire is struck by their “peculiar force of character” (p. 18). “For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë,” Gaskell explains, “it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed” (p. 18). Gaskell characterizes Brontë as “one who has led a wild and struggling and isolated life,—seeing few but plain and outspoken Northerns, unskilled in the euphuisms which assist the polite world to skim over the mention of vice” (p. 297).
To some degree Gaskell’s prejudice reflects Brontë’s own, and her defense takes its cue from Brontë’s “Biographical Notice” of her sisters, which prefaced the posthumous edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that Brontë prepared for her publisher, Smith, Elder and Company in 1850. The great theme of the “Biographical Notice” is of contagion. Brontë describes her sisters as unconscious victims of what they observed, thus finding an external explanation for the disturbing elements of their work. Emily was contaminated not through direct contact with the Haworth locals, but through their lore, which unconsciously shaped her imagination. “In listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress,” Brontë explains. She maintains that Emily “did not know what she had done” in writing Wuthering Heights. Anne “hated her work,” Brontë insists, but “believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail” of the dissolute characters she drew as a warning to others (p. 282). Brontë characterizes both of her sisters as unwilling scribes, whose subjects were forced upon them by the exigencies of life.
Similarly, Gaskell maintains that Brontë was “utterly unconscious” of “what was, by some, deemed coarse in her writings,” and she urges the reader to “remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be” (p. 425). The offending elements of Jane Eyre are copied from life, Gaskell explains, while the scenes drawn from Brontë’s “own imagination... stand out in exquisite relief from the deep shadows and wayward lines” of the “wild and grotesque” scenes of life she witnessed around her (p. 244).
Gaskell locates the most acute source of moral contagion within the parsonage itself, however, in the shape of Brontë’s brother, Branwell, whose struggle with alcoholism and opium addiction resulted in premature death. “Think of her home,” Gaskell exhorts the reader who would fault Brontë for want of delicacy, “and the black shadow of remorse lying over one in it, till his very brain was mazed, and his gifts and his life were lost” (p. 245). In Gaskell’s estimation Branwell’s sins range from denying his sisters’ dream of independence—his evident debauchery being the reason they were unable to start a school at the parsonage—to the more strained claim that the “many bitter noiseless tears” Brontë shed on his account weakened her eyesight (p. 219).
The Brontës viewed Branwell as the most promising artist among them. Accordingly, they were prepared to make sacrifices to forward his education. Brontë’s letters evidence the pressure she and her sisters felt to relieve their father of the financial burden of their maintenance so that he could support Branwell’s attendance at the Royal Academy of Arts. All three sisters went out as governesses, although they were ill suited to the work, which Brontë termed “‘slavery’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell generalizes the plight of the Brontë sisters with a feminist apostrophe: “These are not the first sisters who have laid their lives as a sacrifice before their brother’s idolized wish. Would to God they might be the last who met with such a miserable return!” (p. 107). Branwell never entered the Royal Academy; the reason why is unknown. Instead, he cycled through a series of jobs, ending in a position analogous to that of his sisters, as tutor to a prominent local family, the Robinsons of Thorp Green Hall.
Evasions
While at Thorp Green Hall, Branwell allegedly engaged in a sexual relationship with Lydia Robinson, the wife of his employer. No proof has been found, but Branwell’s assertions that Robinson was one “whom I must, till death, call my wife” (Branwell Brontë to Francis Grundy, October 1845; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 367) and his dismissal in the summer of 1845 for behavior that his employer characterized as “bad beyond expression” are suggestive (p. 222). If Gaskell melodramatically represents the Brontë sisters as victims of Branwell’s profligacy, she is even more extravagant in absolving Branwell from responsibility for the Robinson affair. Gaskell rests most of the blame with Robinson, noting that this “case presents the reverse of the usual features; the man became the victim.” In Gaskell’s telling Branwell is merely one of a number of “innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door” (p. 223).
Not surprisingly, Robinson, who had remarried and become Lady Scott by the time the Life appeared, threatened Gaskell with a libel suit. All unsold copies of the Life were pulled from the shelves, a revised edition issued, and a public retraction printed in the Times (May 26, 1857). This injured Gaskell’s personal credibility and raised questions about the factual accuracy of the Life generally: It begged the question of why Gaskell should place such emphasis on an episode tangential to Brontë’s history.
As one contemporary reviewer observed, because the Life was written so soon after Brontë’s death and many of those concerned in it were living, the text is fissured by suppressions and evasions that occasion us “to read between the lines” (Easson, p. 381). The Robinson episode is one. Gaskell had to provide a compelling reason for Brontë’s aggravated depression at the end of her stay in Brussels and after her return to Haworth in January 1844, which resulted from her unrequited attachment to a married man, Constantin Heger. Heger was Brontë’s literature teacher at the school she attended in Brussels, which was run by his wife. Brontë was later employed there as an English teacher. Heger’s growing awareness of the intensity of Brontë’s feelings caused him to withdraw from her, and her relationship with Mme. Heger, her employer, simmered with so much suppressed hostility that it became too uncomfortable for Brontë to remain. Gaskell provides an earlier, inaccurate date for Branwell’s disgrace and freights the episode with excessive narrative energy in order to cover the trace of Brontë’s more innocent but, to Gaskell, equally shocking secret.