Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,
published in 1857, two years after its subject’s death, is the kind of text
that today seems more often to be quoted than read.
At any rate this is certainly
true amongst the undergraduate population. As an English Literature student I
had some idea of those aspects of
Charlotte’s life that Gaskell emphasised (Charlotte’s closeness to her
siblings, her sense of duty, and her mental strength compared with her physical
weakness) and those aspects that the biographer chose to downplay (Charlotte’s
relationships with Belgian schoolteacher M. Heger and her publisher George
Smith, for instance, or the identification of Jane Eyre’s Lowood with the Clergy Daughters’ School, where Maria
and Elizabeth Brontë died).
But reading The Life now, after years steeped in Brontë-lore (e.g. other biographies all of which
took Gaskell as their starting point, exhibitions such as the Morgan’s wonderful
bicentenary celebration), is a fascinating experience. Gaskell set out to
memorialise her friend and fellow novelist, but what she set in motion was a
cult-like fascination with, not just Charlotte’s novels, but the personality
behind them, the family that lead to them, and the very land that now bears the
name of ‘Brontë country’.
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| The Brontë Parsonage today |
Here are a few aspects of the
biography that stood out most to me as having had a profound effect on the
afterlife of the Brontë ‘myth’:
1. ‘Explaining’ the Brontës through reference to their environment and
isolation
Gaskell begins the biography with
a detailed description of Keighley, Haworth and the surrounding countryside,
emphasising the neighbourhood’s bleakness and relative isolation.
A representative paragraph:
All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like
hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of
similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas
of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling
which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier,
according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be.
Throughout The Life, she emphasises the uniqueness of the Brontë children’s upbringing in such an
environment, painting the moors as the perfect backdrop for literary
inspiration – something many later interpreters of the family’s lives have
followed her in. She also establishes a connection between Emily in particular
and the moorland, another commonplace in the Brontë fable. Here, she quotes from one of Charlotte’s
letters:
My sister Emily loved the moors.
Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her;
—out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside, her mind could make an Eden.
She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and
best loved was—liberty.
Cut off from civilisation, set
apart from their peers and raised in the wild, the siblings are described as
strangely old before their time:
The hieroglyphics of childhood were an
unknown language to them, Gaskell
writes.
2. The romanticisation of the Brontës’ early deaths
Linked to this is the
romanticisation of the siblings’ deaths, so close together and so tragically
young. Gaskell ends the first chapter of the biography by quoting the
inscription on the Haworth church tablet in full (the tablet that existed then
but was later replaced) and we are never allowed to forget the imminent threat
of illness, the fragility of the family as a whole:
Now Emily was far away in Haworth—where
she or any other loved one, might die, before Charlotte, with her utmost speed,
could reach them, as experience, in her aunt’s case, had taught her.
This depiction of the Brontës as close to death, even from infancy, and crushingly aware of
their own mortality is relatively commonplace, but we’d do well, I think, to
consider the normality of fatal illnesses in society at this time. The Brontës might have
been especially unlucky, but they were not unique in the number of tragedies
they underwent. In Gaskell’s rendering Charlotte’s approach to death is most
striking in its pragmatism and religious conviction.
3. The emergence of Branwell as a shadowy and intriguing figure
Finally, Gaskell’s excessive praise
of Branwell, despite his ‘faults’ and ‘vices’, set the tone for decades of
speculation about the Brontë brother.
He was very clever, no doubt; perhaps to
begin with, the greatest genius in this rare family. The sisters hardly
recognised their own, or each others’ powers, but they knew his.
The boy who should have been a
genius, an artist, or the greatest novelist of all has been a strange addition
to the story of three female writers of extraordinary talent. Gaskell was
trying to prove Charlotte’s femininity, to praise her sisterly pride in her
brother. Instead, she spawned various conspiracy theories.
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