Several of Gaskell’s works, including “The Heart of John Middleton,” are published in Charles Dickens’s weekly journal Household Words. The Moorland Cottage, a novella, is published in book form.

1851 The first two chapters of Cranford—often considered Gaskell’s most popular work—are published in Household Words (the final installments will appear in 1853). “The Deserted Mansion” appears in Fraser’s Magazine.
1853 Gaskell’s Ruth is published in book form; the novel stirs controversy because it questions the conventional wisdom that the life of a “fallen woman” necessarily ends in ruin. Cranford is published in book form. The stories “Cumberland Sheep Shearers” and “The Squire’s Story,” among others, appear in Household Words. Charlotte’s novel Villette is published in January. In April, Charlotte and Gaskell spend a week together in Manchester; in September, Gaskell visits Charlotte at Haworth.
1854 Gaskell’s novel North and South, which addresses social problems, is serialized in Household Words. Gaskell meets Florence Nightingale in London. In June, Charlotte marries Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she has known since 1845, when he began work as a curate at Haworth.
1855 Charlotte is happily married for a few months, but early in the year she becomes ill; she dies on March 31. Her father asks Gaskell to write Charlotte’s biography North and South is published in book form, and Household Words publishes Gaskell’s “An Accursed Race” and “Half a Life-Time Ago.” A group of Gaskell’s short stories is published as the book Lizzie Leigh and Other Stories.
1857 Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë is published. Although it is praised by most, some individuals depicted in the work threaten legal action over the way they are portrayed. Charlotte’s first novel and the last to bear her name, The Professor, is published, though the book’s release is partly obscured by the enormous interest readers show in Gaskell’s biography of her. The Matrimonial Causes Act enables women to inherit, own, and bequeath property.
1858 Gaskell’s “The Doom of the Griffiths” appears in the American monthly Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. “My Lady Ludlow” and other short stories are published in Household Words.
1859 Round the Sofa and Other Tales, a book of short stories, is published. Several short stories appear in All the Year Round, Dickens’s new weekly magazine. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are published.
1860 Right at Last and Other Tales, a book of short stories, is published.
1861 The American Civil War begins.
1862 “Six Weeks at Heppenheim” is published in the Cornhill Magazine.
1863 “A Dark Night’s Work” appears in All the Year Round. Cousin Phyllis, a short novel, is serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, to be concluded early in 1864. The story’s country setting prefigures a more detailed portrait in Wives and Daughters. The novel Sylvia’s Lovers, set in Napoléon’s time, is published.
1864 The first installments of Wives and Daughters appear in the Cornhill Magazine. The novel evokes the pastoral setting of Gaskell’s girlhood country home.
1865 As a surprise for her husband’s future retirement, Gaskell buys a country house in Hampshire with the proceeds from her writing. Physically exhausted, and yet to complete the final installment of her novel, Gaskell dies suddenly on a visit to the house on 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.