Significantly, she cools her relationship with William Smith Williams, the firm’s literary adviser, at this time as well. “Do not trouble yourself to select or send any more books. These courtesies must cease one day,” she writes, “and I would rather give them up than wear them out” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, December 6, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 212). She had expected no less than £700 pounds for Villette, and Smith offered only £500, the same sum he had paid for Jane Eyre and Shirley, respectively. To place this in context, Smith paid Gaskell £1,000 for the Life. It was on the basis of Jane Eyre’s success that Smith’s reputation grew and that the firm attracted other high-profile clients, Thackeray among them. A growing sense of professional dissatisfaction may have prompted Brontë to withdraw from amicable relations with the men of Smith, Elder and Company. Brontë’s retreat also coincides with her decision to marry, suggesting perhaps that she saw a new vocation becoming evident.

Courtship and Marriage

Gaskell prefaces her discussion of Brontë’s courtship and marriage with a caveat. “As I draw nearer to the years so recently closed, it becomes impossible for me to write with the same fulness of detail as I have hitherto,” Gaskell explains, signaling that she will offer a version of the truth, but not the whole truth (p. 440). Gaskell keeps to the letter of her law in portraying the tortuous history of Brontë’s courtship with Nicholls by citing Patrick’s opposition to the match as its only impediment, and not registering any of Brontë’s own ambivalence. Brontë feared that her future husband’s views on religious and social issues might prove too narrow to suit her, and she worried that he would be unsympathetic to her literary concerns. “My own objections arise from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feelings, tastes—principles,” Brontë confessed to Nussey (Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, December 18, 1852; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 95). Gaskell represents Brontë’s initial refusal of Nicholls as a duty to a father who appears at once tyrannical and dependent. Gaskell observes how “quietly and modestly” Brontë, “on whom such hard judgments had been passed by ignorant reviewers,” received Nicholls’s “vehement, passionate declaration of love,” and how “unselfishly” she refused it in deference to her father’s wishes (p. 421).

Gaskell attempts to gloss over Patrick’s actual objections to the match, that Nicholls was socially beneath his daughter and his income too modest, by saying that he “disapproved of marriages” generally. Brontë’s letters say otherwise, however. Patrick did encourage James Taylor’s suit. Taylor, who was a manager of Smith, Elder and Company, is not named as a correspondent throughout the Life, although Gaskell quotes liberally from letters Brontë wrote to him both before and after rejecting him. Gaskell doubtless intended to protect Brontë from the charge that she encouraged a proposal that she did not accept. By including mention of Taylor’s proposal as well as those from two other suitors that Brontë received before Nicholls presented himself, Gaskell makes clear that she remained single by choice, not fate, scorning to marry simply to escape “the stigma of an old maid,” as she told her first suitor, Henry Nussey, Ellen’s brother (Charlotte Brontë to Henry Nussey, March 5, 1839; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, pp. 185-186). Brontë’s three previous rejections also give a consequent weight to her decision to accept Nicholls.

Nicholls’s persistence assured Brontë of the intensity of his passion, something she feared he lacked, and his promise not to seek an independent living but to remain at Haworth as Patrick’s curate relieved her father’s fear of separation. “By degrees Mr. Brontë became reconciled to the idea of his daughter’s marriage,” Gaskell reports, suppressing the fact that she may have directly contributed to this change of heart by secretly arranging for Nicholls to receive a pension that increased his income, something that Brontë never discovered (p. 440; The Letters of Mrs.