In retrospectively attributing a depressive affect to Brontë, Gaskell writes: “I can well imagine that the grave serious composure... was no acquisition of later years, but dated from that early age when she found herself in the position of an elder sister to motherless children” (p. 77). Gaskell’s description of Brontë’s mother is animated by the same dual impulse that informs her portrait of Brontë. On the one hand, Maria Branwell is made to bear the burden of conventional feminine respectability that her daughter was accused of lacking; on the other, she is an independent thinker and writer, and her letters are the “ ‘records of a mind whence my own sprang,’ ” as Brontë herself put it (p. 336). In service of the latter, Gaskell provides extracts from Maria Branwell’s letters to the Reverend Patrick Brontë written during their engagement, and refers to a monograph Maria Branwell intended for publication, “The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns” (p. 40). In addition, when Gaskell enumerates the literary influences upon the young Brontë, listing the canonical authors she found in her father’s library, the biographer also includes the imaginative legacy Brontë inherited from her mother in the form of her collection of romantically sea-stained “Lady’s Magazines” and “Methodist Magazines,” full of superstition and romance, that Brontë (as she noted in a letter) “ ‘read by stealth,’ ” because her father did not approve of them (pp. 97-98, 149).

The Maria Branwell that Gaskell acquaints us with diffidently prepares for matrimony by “learning by heart a ‘pretty little hymn’ of Mr. Brontë’s composing,” and baking her own wedding cake (p. 39). After marriage, Gaskell reports, “Maria Branwell fades out of sight; we have no more direct intercourse with her; we hear of her as Mrs. Brontë, but it is as an invalid, not far from death” (p. 39). With a Gothic flourish, Gaskell compresses years of married life and childbearing into the ominous report that “Mrs. Brontë was confined to the bed-room from which she never came forth alive” (p. 43).

The fate of Brontë’s mother is meant to foreshadow Brontë’s own fate after her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, when, as Gaskell sees it, her professional identity became subsumed into her husband’s as she performed the endless round of duties incumbent upon a curate’s wife at the expense of cultivating her imaginative life. Before commencing the section of the Life that details Brontë’s engagement and marriage, Gaskell exhorts the reader once more to consider the “intellectual side of character, before we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife” (p. 440). According to Victorian social economy, Gaskell warns, the birth of Mrs. Nicholls entails the death of Miss Brontë, but that is a system of accounting that the Life works to redress.

“Coarseness”

Gaskell intended the biography to vindicate Brontë, who had come under personal attack for the “coarseness” of her works. The charge was a general one, indicating that the novels were not sufficiently feminine or delicate either in expression or subject matter. Reviewers objected particularly to Brontë’s frank treatment of female desire, but the angry subtexts of her novels, which debunked religious hypocrisy and decried social inequity, also rankled Victorian audiences who found such criticism especially insupportable from the pen of a woman. “Conventionality is not morality,” Brontë admonished her critics in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. “Self-righteousness is not religion.” One reviewer, Elizabeth Rigby, branded Jane Eyre a “dangerous” book, calling its heroine “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit,” and condemning the novel’s “murmuring against God’s appointment” and its “proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man.” The review culminates in an ad hominem attack that impugns Brontë’s character as a woman. “If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex,” Rigby pronounced (Allot, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, pp. 109, 111).

In the face of vicious public attacks such as this one, Gaskell felt that she had a “grave duty” to protect her friend’s reputation—both literary and personal (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 245). As part of her recuperative task, Gaskell cannot emphasize enough the strange “otherness” of the Yorkshire people Brontë lived among, maintaining that even an inhabitant of neighboring Lancashire is struck by their “peculiar force of character” (p.