But that cannot be; there’s no use thinking about it. A literary career is closed to me” (p. 219; my translation).

Brontë’s despair registers as anxiety about her ability to make her voice heard as a published author. Heger heard that voice and knew its power, reflecting its worth back to Brontë in his comments on her devoirs (composition exercises). Brontë’s increasing desperation at his silence after she leaves Brussels stemmed perhaps not from desire for his affection, but from a need for his encouragement to write.

Another relationship that receives evasive treatment in the Life is Brontë’s friendship with her publisher, George Smith, which had an exuberant quality unlike any other in Brontë’s adult life. Brontë’s letters to Smith dance with a boisterous, good-humored sarcasm not fully displayed in the Life, as Smith withheld the most playful of them from Gaskell, claiming they were too “purely personal” to be “generally interesting” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 271a).

In Villette Lucy Snowe describes the penchant that Dr. John, who was inspired by Smith, has for making life exciting: “Of every door which shut in an object worth seeing... he seemed to possess the ‘Open! Sesame.’ ” Similarly, Smith brought to life some of Brontë’s fantasies. He arranged a visit to the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons. He took her to the chapel at St. James’s Palace to see her childhood idol, the Duke of Wellington, at Sunday worship. He initiated a trip to Scotland to visit the home of her favorite novelist, Sir Walter Scott. He introduced Brontë to William Makepeace Thackeray, the contemporary author she most admired. As a lasting memory, Smith presented Brontë with portraits of her heroes, Wellington and Thackeray, and to complete the fantasy, he commissioned one of Brontë, by George Richmond, a leading portraitist of the day, thus enshrining her among her worthies.

Gaskell discovered evidence in the Brontë-Nussey correspondence, which she suppresses in the Life, of a romantic attachment between Brontë and her publisher. Nussey, who did not approve of Brontë’s traveling to Scotland with the unmarried Smith and his sister, an event that Gaskell neatly sidesteps in the Life, asked her to qualify their relationship. Brontë breezily reassures Ellen: “My six or eight years of seniority to say nothing of lack of all pretension to beauty &c. are a perfect safeguard—I should not in the least fear to go with him to China” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, June 20, 1850; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 419).

Six months later, however, Brontë adopts a slightly darker tone when she concedes that were “there no vast barrier of age, fortune, &c. there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which now are impossible. If men and women married because they like each others’ temper, look, conversation, nature and so on ... the chance you allude to might be admitted as a chance—but other reasons regulate matrimony—reasons of convenience, of connection, of money.” Brontë is also now reluctant to travel with Smith, who had proposed a trip to Germany. “That hint about the Rhine disturbs me,” Brontë tells Nussey, “I am not made of stone—and what is excitement to him—is fever to me” (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, January 20, 1851; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 557).

Commentators make much of the chillingly terse note of congratulation Brontë sent Smith when she received news of his forthcoming marriage: “In great happiness as in great grief, words of sympathy should be few. Accept my mead of congratulation” (Charlotte Brontë to George Smith, December 10, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 213). Brontë’s displeasure with Smith may have been compounded by what she perceived to be a professional, not a personal slight.