Charlotte Brontë, who died in 1855 aged 38, might almost have been an Elizabeth Gaskell heroine. 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. 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.

The two novelists first met in the Lake District in the summer of 1850. They were, in many respects, polar opposites. 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”). 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. Yet each was fascinated by the other.

Brontë had soon invited Mrs Gaskell to Haworth, a rare honour, and Gaskell was also deeply impressed by her new friend. “Such a life as Miss Brontë’s I have never heard of before,” she marvelled to one correspondent.

Within five years of this first meeting, however, Brontë was dead. Barely 10 weeks after her death, her grieving father, Patrick, made the first overture to Mrs Gaskell to write his daughter’s life. 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”.

The whole project has a confident, predestined air of Victorian certainty. 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.

Unlike most contemporary biographers, Gaskell set out on her research with an explicit mission: to set down the facts, as she saw them, of a “wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it”.

From the first, her account would be coloured by her devotion to her friend, even if she could admit that her version was partisan: “The difficulty that presented itself most strongly to me when I first had the honour of being requested to write this biography,” she wrote, “was how I could show what a noble, true, and tender woman Charlotte Brontë really was, without mingling up with her life too much of the personal history of her nearest and most intimate friends. After much consideration of this point, I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others.”

Her discretion would have one set of consequences; her industry another. The alacrity with which Gaskell completed her task must leave most modern biographers gasping in astonishment. This was a commission executed at warp speed, barely 18 months from start to finish. A book of some 500 pages, begun in the summer of 1855, was sent to the printer in the spring of 1857, and published on 25 March the same year.

The portrait of “Miss Brontë” – partly based on extensive quotation from Charlotte’s letters – that Gaskell presented to the mid-Victorian reader caused an immediate stir, stoking a controversy that lingers today. If she was fairly scrupulous in the portrait of her subject, which is never more than a point of mild contention, Gaskell gave her novelistic instincts free rein in her treatment of Brontë’s brother, Branwell, and their father, Patrick. Vis a vis Branwell, she describes the young man’s downfall and premature death as the result of a passionate affair with his employer’s wife, who in the first edition Gaskell libelled to such a degree that first and second printings had to be withdrawn, revised and corrected.

What, you might ask, has any of this to do with Charlotte Brontë? Gaskell was determined to present her subject’s sufferings at home as part of the intolerable burdens that shaped her life and art, and to do this she used all the evidence she could find. In any event, her account of Branwell’s destruction at the hands of Lydia Robinson is nothing compared to her portrait of Patrick Brontë. Again, Gaskell is frank about the difficulties she faced as a biographer. Of Brontë père, she writes: “But I do not pretend to be able to harmonize points of character, and account for them, and bring them all in to one consistent and intelligible whole. The family with whom I have now to do shot their roots down deeper than I can penetrate. I cannot measure them, much less is it for me to judge them. I have named these instances of eccentricity in the father because I hold the knowledge of them to be necessary for a right understanding of the life of his daughter.”

As one critic has written: “The father of the Brontës was certainly aware of his own eccentricities, and, while there can be no doubt that Mrs Gaskell exaggerated them in order to indicate the pressures under which Charlotte suffered during her childhood, his own protests were mild in comparison with the praise he had for the Life when it first appeared.”

For some, Patrick Brontë was irredeemably tarnished by Gaskell’s portrait, although much of her picture of the Brontës’ home life seems highly circumspect: “The sisters [Anne, Emily and Charlotte] had kept the knowledge of their literary ventures from their father, fearing to increase their own anxieties and disappointment by witnessing his; for he took an acute interest in all that befell his children, and his own tendency had been towards literature in the days when he was young and hopeful.”

This is certainly tactful; elsewhere, she strays closer to hagiography. To a degree that no 21st-century biographer would emulate, Gaskell suppressed a number of inconvenient truths. During her years in Belgium, Charlotte had fallen in love with her teacher, Constantin Héger, a married man. Although both The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853) convey graphically her state of mind during this affair, Gaskell decided it was too delicate a matter for Victorian sensibilities. In a number of other areas, she was frank enough, but Gaskell also omitted any reference to Charlotte’s relationship with George Smith, her publisher, who also published the Life.

Gaskell’s account of the publication of Jane Eyre (1847) – a process almost unimaginably removed from the contemporary world of literary agents, creative writing professors, and book festivals – captures the details of Brontë’s extraordinary transition from obscurity to fame, and tries, fleetingly, to understand “two parallel currents”: the life of the male writer, “Currer Bell”, and the life of the woman, Charlotte Brontë. “There were separate duties belonging to each character – not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled.”

Gaskell is much more comfortable at Haworth than in literary London, and she paints an unforgettable portrait of the home life of the sisters in general, and Charlotte in particular. Her use of the letters of Ellen Nussey, a family friend, illustrates her determination to present an overall picture of the artist growing up in an emotionally starved, and tortured domestic society that remains both fascinating and appalling. Gaskell’s account of Haworth was both the making of the Life, and the source of an ongoing controversy. The facts remain that the terrible sequence of the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne, braided with a life overshadowed by the tyrannical “eccentricities” of their father, placed an almost unimaginable burden on the mind of a deeply sensitive and thoughtful novelist.

Gaskell herself was certain she had done her best. She wrote to Nussey that “I weighed every line with my whole power and heart” to fulfil the biographer’s “great purpose of making her known”. For some, indeed, Gaskell’s Life is her best book.

A signature sentence

“It is possible that it would have been better to have described only good and pleasant people, doing only good and pleasant things (in which case they could hardly have written at any time): all I say is, that never, I believe, did women, possessed of such wonderful gifts, exercise them with a fuller feeling of responsibility for their use.”

Three to compare

James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
John Forster: The Life of Charles Dickens (1874)
Jenny Uglow: Elizabeth Gaskell – A Habit of Stories (1993)

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