But she does at times undercut the full radical potential of the sympathy she awakens by imposing a recuperative ending. Brontë objected to Ruth’s death, for example, on the grounds that it diminishes the novel’s efficacy as an agent of change: “ ‘Such a book may restore hope and energy to many who thought they had forfeited their right to both.... Yet hear my protest! Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping?’ ” (p. 406). Significantly, Brontë encases her political critique in an affective one, perhaps aware that she was treading on sensitive ground.

There is a similar hesitancy, unlike Brontë’s forthright and assured voice when addressing critical questions in letters to Williams, for example, in the rhetorical question she puts to Gaskell about the pressure she might encounter to conform to proscribed standards and beliefs in her work: “Do you, who have so many friends,—so large a circle of acquaintance,—find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman, uninfluenced or swayed by the consciousness of how your work might affect other minds.... Does no luminous cloud ever come between you and the severe Truth, as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing soul? Don’t answer this question; it is not intended to be answered” (pp. 433-434). Although Brontë is careful to bestow the ladylike designation “sweet associations,” upon them, she is prodding Gaskell to reassess the ties that may bind her to a conventionalism she might not adhere to in her “secret and clear-seeing soul.” Brontë pushes Gaskell to confront her own limitations as a writer here, and urges her toward a greater degree of verisimilitude.

Brontë’s social impulse is harder to characterize than is Gaskell’s, which is what may account for Gaskell’s ambivalence about her work. (Critics have begun to consider the feminist implications of Brontë’s novels relatively recently.) “I often wish to say something about the ‘condition of women’ question,” she told Williams, “but it is one respecting which so much ‘cant’ has been talked, that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it. It is true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked—but where or how could another be opened?” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).

Jane Eyre registers the restlessness and dissatisfaction a governess feels with her lot in life: “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do” (p. 96). Responding to the charge that the heroine of Villette “ ‘may be thought morbid and weak,’ ” Brontë retorts, “ ‘anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid’ ” (p. 416). Brontë does not isolate Lucy Snowe as a case study of neurosis; rather, she puts her “morbidity” in perspective, pointing to its cultural causes, above all the limited range for the exercise of her intellect in dignified employment.

Teaching was virtually the only respectable profession open to women of Brontë’s social standing, and teachers’ salaries were generally not sufficient to render them truly independent. Gaskell does not shy from registering Brontë’s disdain for that kind of work: “ ‘I am no teacher; to look on me in that light is to mistake me. To teach is not my vocation. What I am, it is useless to say. Those whom it concerns feel and find it out,’ ” Brontë told Nussey (p. 326). As a teacher at Miss Wooler’s school, Brontë chafed against the uniformity of her employment: “ ‘Nothing but teach, teach, teach, from morning to night’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell qualifies Brontë’s time there as “tedious and monotonous,” but in the journal Brontë kept at this time she describes it more pejoratively, as a term of imprisonment: “ ‘Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare-walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?’ ” (Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 39). While the Life does register the depth of Brontë’s anguish during this period, it casts her professional identity crisis of 1835-1837 as a religious crisis, relying as it does on Brontë’s letters to Nussey in which she uses the cryptic language of transgression and of longing for “ ‘reconciliation to God’ ” to describe her angst (p. 113). But the journal entries from the same period tell a different story—one of frustrated genius—of longing to “write gloriously” but being condemned to teach “Dolts” and “asses” (The Brontës, pp. 39-40).

The Brontë-Nussey Correspondence

Some argue that the Life suffers from Gaskell’s heavy reliance on Brontë’s letters to Nussey, who is often characterized as a provincial and conventional person with whom Brontë did not discuss her literary concerns. This view of Nussey is based in part on a letter in which Brontë seems to slight her when she describes her as “no more than a conscientious, observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl” who is “without romance,” and whose clumsy attempts to read poetry aloud make Brontë want to stop her ears.