37, 41).

Gaskell paints Patrick as a misanthropic and unsympathetic father who neglected his growing daughters’ health, education, and social needs. Patrick did see to it that all of his daughters were offered formal education in a period when it was not considered a right or a necessity. Furthermore, his unconventional approach to their education, whether through benign neglect, as Gaskell argues, or from a more active principle, worked to draw out Brontë’s talent. She was allowed unfettered access to Patrick’s library, and she was not barred from reading authors not considered appropriate fare for young women at the time. Among these was Lord Byron, whose version of Romanticism influenced Brontë greatly. The one area in which Patrick did exercise censorship was in burning his wife’s collection of the “Lady’s Magazines,” because they contained “foolish love stories” that he did not like his daughters to read (Charlotte Brontë to Hartley Coleridge, December 10, 1840; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 1, p. 240).

Gaskell’s antipathy for Patrick may be explained in part by her first meeting him at a time of crisis in the Brontë household, when father and daughter had reached an uneasy stalemate after Patrick forbade Brontë to accept Nicholls’s offer of marriage. “He was very polite and agreeable to me,” Gaskell commented on Patrick’s demeanor during her visit, adding that she was nevertheless, “sadly afraid of him in my inmost soul; for I caught a glance of his stern eyes over his spectacles at Miss Brontë once or twice which made me know my man” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 166). Both Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, whose friendship with Brontë dated back to their days together at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, thought Patrick overly controlling.

Patrick did not seem to sense Gaskell’s unease. He encouraged her friendship with his daughter, writing shortly after Gaskell’s visit: “I think that you and my daughter are congenial spirits, and that a little intercourse between you might under the strange vicissitudes and frequent trials of this mortal life... be productive of pleasure and profit to you both” (Patrick Brontë to Gaskell, September 15, 1853; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 3, p. 193).

Sister Authors?

As two of the most famous writers of their day, Brontë and Gaskell shared an exceptional bond. Although Brontë’s fame now eclipses Gaskell’s, in their day Gaskell was perhaps the more generally admired of the two. Modern reversal of Victorian valuation may have more to do with narrative mode than choice of subject matter; Gaskell’s sentimentalism fell out of favor, while Brontë’s psychological realism finds greater and greater resonance with successive generations of readers. But this imbalance is now being redressed, as critics take a new interest in the social significance of Gaskell’s work. Patrick Brontë praised the biography as “every way worthy of what one Great Woman, should have written of Another” (Patrick Brontë to Gaskell, July 30, 1857; quoted in Barker, The Brontës, p. 808). Similarly, a reviewer remarked that the Life benefited from insights that could only have been provided by “a kindred spirit, a fellow-worker in the same vineyard, a sister genius, and a loving-friend” (Easson, p. 388).

Although it is a quaint notion to picture Brontë and Gaskell as toilers in the same “vineyard,” the true extent of their literary sisterhood is debatable. Gaskell was a noted “condition of England” novelist, whose fiction was a vehicle for education and reform, although her work is more nuanced than this rubric suggests, and she moved away from this model in later novels, as in the posthumously published Wives and Daughters (1866). She gives voice to the concerns of disenfranchised workers in her industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), and, in her most controversial novel, Ruth (1853), she depicts the confluence of social and economic forces that lead to the seduction of a young woman. Gaskell allows Ruth to survive her shame and lead a useful life for a time, only to impose a penitential ending in which Ruth dies in an act of self-sacrifice. While aspects of Gaskell’s work may seem overly sentimental to today’s readers, she leverages emotion to build the reader sympathy necessary to open up settled moral questions to a new angle of vision. How do we define criminality? Is stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child more immoral than legalized institutional thefts such as the exploitation of labor and the derogation of personal dignity? Gaskell asserts in the preface to Mary Barton that she is interested in exploring “the state of feeling” on topical issues, not in debating economic facts and figures. She does so, in part, to stay within the proscribed sphere of her sex, but also because she wants her reader to learn to sympathize, not to theorize.

Gaskell viewed fiction writing as a natural extension of the missionary or “rescue work” that she performed as the wife of a Unitarian minister in the great manufacturing hub of Manchester. (For details on Gaskell’s missionary work, see Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell:A Habit of Stories.) This is not to say that her books were traditionalist; Ruth was burned (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154).