The biographer embarked on her “grave duty” quite settled in the conviction that her version would define her friend’s posterity: “the more fully she – Charlotte Brontë – the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife, is known… the more highly she will be appreciated,” she wrote. The whole project has a confident, predestined air of Victorian certainty. Gaskell was determined to present Brontë’s sufferings at home as part of the intolerable burdens that shaped her art Two days later, Gaskell was telling Brontë’s publisher, George Smith, how anxious she was “to perform this grave duty laid upon me well and fully”. Barely 10 weeks after her death, her grieving father, Patrick, made the first overture to Mrs Gaskell to write his daughter’s life. Within five years of this first meeting, however, Brontë was dead. “Such a life as Miss Brontë’s I have never heard of before,” she marvelled to one correspondent. Yet each was fascinated by the other.īrontë had soon invited Mrs Gaskell to Haworth, a rare honour, and Gaskell was also deeply impressed by her new friend. By contrast, Brontë (pseudonymously hiding behind “Currer Bell”) was a sickly, self-effacing, reclusive woman, appalled by children, who hardly ever ventured into literary London.
Gaskell was beautiful, worldly and dizzyingly public: a mother of four familiar with Florence Nightingale, Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and even Dickens, with whom she did not get on (“If I were Mr G,” exclaimed Dickens, “oh heaven, how I would beat her”). They were, in many respects, polar opposites. The two novelists first met in the Lake District in the summer of 1850.
Perhaps it was this that inspired an extraordinary friendship between two great Victorian writers, which would ultimately blossom into one of the most remarkable literary biographies in English prose. Like Margaret Hale in North and South (1855), or Molly Gibson in Wives and Daughters (1864), she’d had to look after a widowed and cantankerous father in very difficult circumstances, facing the grim realities of sickness and death. C harlotte Brontë, who died in 1855 aged 38, might almost have been an Elizabeth Gaskell heroine.
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