30th May, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë

By Graham Watson

Brimming with lies, hagiography and exaggeration! Elizabeth Gaskell’s sensational 1857 biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë continues to divide historians, critics and Brontë fans over 160 years after its first publication.

Some see it as a unique first-hand insight into the Brontë family by one of Britain’s greatest writers, while others still dismiss it as a propaganda exercise compromised by unreliable information and pernicious gossip. What is not in doubt is its considerable influence on English literary history, both as the first biography of a woman writer by another and as the model for the hundreds of books about the Brontës that followed. As a runaway bestseller beset by controversy it almost instantly established the romantic myth of the family and accelerated the literary pilgrimages to their Yorkshire hometown, Haworth. After so much time, can we test the integrity of the book and verify or refute its claims? My book, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë aims to do so.

The first challenge of any historical investigation is to distinguish and separate the first-hand historical evidence from the usually more elaborate later interpretations transmitted from one biographer to another, that have collected errors and confirmed biases. With a history as contested as that of the Brontë family this is even more embroiled, as cultural trends apply new interpretations and changing tastes elevate or demote one of the three Brontë sisters over the others, as though only a limited amount of praise can be apportioned and divided between them. Answers, as always, lie in the historical record. Letters and recollections by the Brontë and Gaskell families, their friends and associates and other first-hand witnesses tell rather a different story that challenges many received notions about the Brontës, especially around the writing and reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë.

Gaskell and Brontë had been friends for the last five years of Charlotte’s life, having corresponded with each other for a year before that. Both were professional women who had published well received novels, both came from clerical families and suffered bereavements early in life. There the parallels ended. Gaskell was married with children, hosted intellectual evenings in her large Manchester home with the finest minds of the day, while Brontë, unmarried and practically broken by the recent deaths of her three adult siblings lived in crippling solitude with her volatile elderly father in a remote Yorkshire mill town. When Gaskell began to wonder how one of the greatest talents of their generation could have lived such a deprived life, the germ for telling Charlotte Brontë’s story formed. Crucially, the anecdotes Charlotte herself shared, the ‘wild strange facts’ about the talented quartet of ignored sibling geniuses practically raising and educating themselves in isolation, so captivated Gaskell that when Brontë died and her father asked her to address scurrilous newspaper stories about his family, she was already well prepared.

Nevertheless, refusing to rely solely on her own recollections, she embarked on a remarkable campaign to track down and interview everyone who had known Charlotte Brontë, from former schoolfriends and nursemaids, to neighbouring shopkeepers and fellow writers like William Thackeray and Harriet Martineau, and to read as many of her personal letters as her friends were willing to donate, despite the reserve and caution several felt about making the details of her life public. Even more remarkably, Elizabeth Gaskell travelled to the continent, to Belgium, to interview in person the married man Charlotte nursed a secret love for while she was a student. Looked at together, the accounts conflicted and Gaskell devoted herself to reconstructing a truthful account of a troubled woman whose determination and intellect made her a visionary writer. But Gaskell knew that telling the truth would be controversial. She felt Charlotte had been maligned and manipulated by many of those around her and was determined to shame them publicly, warning her publishers to familiarise themselves with libel laws.

When The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857 it triggered a firestorm of controversy that led to the first edition being withdrawn and rewritten twice in six months. Many of those named in it objected to Gaskell’s indiscretions or felt slandered, with several threatening to sue both Gaskell and her publisher. Knowing a court case would require the testimonies of many socially and economically disadvantaged women, as some key biographical statements had come from servants, Gaskell chose to take the blame and publicly admit errors that she privately insisted were true. It was a noble political choice, to sacrifice her own public standing in order to appease her complainants and extinguish legal threats. But the result has gone uncorrected and Gaskell’s reputation as an unreliable biographer remains. Setting the record straight and delivering justice to both Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell is long overdue.