The Life of Charlotte Bronte Read Free Page A

November 12. She is buried at Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford.
1866
The serial publication of Wives and Daughters ends. In lieu of the novel’s last installment, the editor of the Cornhill Magazine writes a note that explains how he thinks the author would have completed the book. The novel is released in book form.
1928
In August, Haworth Parsonage opens to the public as the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

INTRODUCTION

The Apology
    There is a photographic realism to the opening passages of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, with its view of the Leeds and Bradford railway running along the deep valley of the Aire, and its double-exposure image capturing Keighley’s transformation from an old-fashioned village into a busy manufacturing town. With the gritty aspect of a daguerreotype, the Life pictures “the great worsted factories” and worker cottages poised between Keighley and Brontë’s village of Haworth, and describes the air as “dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business” (p. 12). Focusing her lens not on the picturesque details of Brontë’s Yorkshire but rather on its industrial aspect, Gaskell situates her subject in a time of technological revolution that is ushering in social and political change. In pointing out that “modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion” (p. 11) occur at a more rapid pace in newly industrialized areas than they do elsewhere in England, Gaskell neatly anticipates the Life’s broader agenda concerning changing attitudes toward women’s place in the social order.
    As we begin the ascent from Keighley to Haworth, “the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists,” and by the time we reach the flower beds under the parsonage windows “only the most hardy plants could be made to grow.” The garden is encroached upon by the churchyard, “terribly full of upright tombstones,” which surrounds the parsonage on all sides but one (pp. 12-14). Suddenly, in the midst of realism we are in metaphor, those tenacious flowers representing Brontë herself, who will lose her struggle to survive in an uncongenial world. The Brontë home is described as a haven of domesticity amid the desolation of the “wild, bleak moors” (p. 13). “Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness”; the very doorsteps are “spotless,” Gaskell assures the reader. “Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity,” Gaskell testifies (p. 14), signaling that we are not, after all, in the province of the documentarian, but rather that of the novelist, the hagiographer, and perhaps even the apologist.
    Gaskell, a friend of Brontë’s and a famous novelist in her own right, undertook the biography project only months after Brontë’s death in 1855 at the urging of Brontë’s father the Reverend Patrick Brontë. Because Brontë was a celebrity, her death generated a lot of attention, most of it unwelcome to those who knew her personally. Brontë’s oldest and closest friend, Ellen Nussey, who was especially troubled by the tabloid stories that were appearing, induced Charlotte’s father to commission a definitive account of his daughter’s life to counter the sensationalistic reports then circulating in the press. Patrick faced opposition from Brontë’s husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who did not like how “the public snatched at every gossiping account” of his wife’s life, and who wanted to keep her memory private. Patrick, who saw the project as a means of controlling Brontë’s literary legacy, prevailed. “No quailing, Mrs. Gaskell!” Patrick directed, “no drawing back!” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 257; see “For Further Reading”).
    Gaskell was herself a member of the hungry public at one time. She wanted desperately to find out who had written the