17th April, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History

The legacy of Charlotte Brontë

By Graham Watson

21st April marks the anniversary of the birth of English novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë. While she lived only 38 years, her legacy – and her celebrity – have remained perennially present. Her 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the most enduring texts of the 19th century, a novel whose capability to capture and influence new generations of readers and writers extends from stream-of-conscious experiments of the early 20th century Modernists through inescapable bestsellers of the 21st century like Fifty Shades of Grey, and into impassioned 6 second videos by TikTok’s young book influencers.

The basics of her life are often repeated. She was the third of six children born to an Irish vicar and his Cornish wife in Thornton, Yorkshire and moved shortly before her 4th birthday when her father was relocated to nearby Haworth. There she spent the rest of her life. Along with the brother and two sisters who survived childhood – Branwell, Emily and Anne – she began writing as a child. In their 20s the sisters published a joint collection of poetry, followed a year later by the novels that made them notorious in their day: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Within 18 months Branwell, Emily and Anne were all dead, just as Charlotte was becoming celebrated as one of Britain’s literary superstars. She produced two more novels – Shirley and Villette – before she too died in 1855, nine months after her marriage.

Journalists at the time saw her early death as sad but not unusual. Some thought it the inevitably tragic end to a tragic life. Yet her closest friends, who felt Charlotte had been exploited, excluded, mistreated and abused all her life, began to demand justice. The one chosen to serve it was the bestselling novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who had known Brontë during her last five years. Determined to deliver not only justice, but a form of revenge for the hardships she felt Brontë unnecessarily endured, Gaskell slandered all those who had mistreated her in a biography so controversial it was banned shortly after publication in response to legal threats and had to be rewritten and reissued twice in 6 months. Out of the media scandal Gaskell detonated came the unstoppable myth of the Brontë siblings as doomed geniuses in romantic solitude. But the question of how much of it was true has dogged historians ever since.

My book, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, reassesses the evidence. Using first-hand accounts it reconstructs how Gaskell’s friendship with Brontë informed her biography more comprehensively than has been previously thought, how she diligently tracked down to interview everyone who had known Brontë and ultimately, driven to the point of obsession, battled those who wished to control how history would remember Brontë and tried to block her from telling her story. The result, her Life of Charlotte Brontë, was a sensation, scandalising readers and outraging those Gaskell had called out.

While it transformed Brontë into one of British history’s most iconic figures, it almost destroyed Gaskell’s sanity. The scandal earned her a lasting reputation as an unreliable opportunist. But, as my book demonstrates, nothing could be further from the truth.