Gaskell, letters 25a, 517). Gaskell is often faulted for attempting to exonerate Brontë by favoring the portrait of “the friend, the daughter, the sister” over that of the professional author (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 267). Her reasoning for not including a critical discussion of Brontë’s novels in the Life, as Brontë’s father had desired, was that “public opinion had already pronounced her fiat, set her seal” upon them (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 294). Nevertheless, in writing the Life Gaskell confronts her own ambivalence about Brontë’s work, and in the process refines her ideas on women’s professional engagement generally. The work is animated by that tension, and consequently it has broader implications that transcend its purported defense of one woman.

Gaskell and the “Brontë Myth”

Long before she was commissioned to write Brontë’s biography, Gaskell began a process of creating “a drama of her life in my own mind” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 266). Gaskell pursued information about her subject with the avidity of a paparazzo. On her first visit to the parsonage, for example, she asked a servant to show her the family graves without Brontë’s knowledge (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 166). And yet Gaskell believed she was motivated by the sympathy of a friend. She pitied Brontë from the first, and romanticized her “wild sad life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 242). She jotted down particulars after hearing them directly from Brontë, and recorded the manner in which she revealed the authorship of Jane Eyre to her father, the privations she faced at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and other more ephemeral and sentimental details that might have otherwise been lost, such as the “shiver” that passed over Brontë when she told Gaskell about bringing the dying Emily a sprig of heather from her beloved moors, and the pathetic spectacle of Emily’s dog, Keeper, following her funeral procession. These notes became the basis for the Life, and, accordingly, much of what is now regarded as the stuff of Brontë myth came directly from Brontë.

Brontë on occasion enjoyed playing the “wild little maiden from Haworth” for her new friend, perhaps sensing an eager audience (p. 82). In her first letter to Gaskell, Brontë offers a glimpse of life at Haworth replete with the romantic touches of “ ‘storms of rain’ ... sweeping over the garden and churchyard” and “the moors... hidden in deep fog” (p. 356). Brontë playfully warns Gaskell before her first visit to the parsonage that she will “come out to barbarism, isolation, and liberty,” and she urges her to come when the heather is in bloom, telling her, “I have waited and watched for its purple signal as the forerunner of your coming” (Charlotte Brontë to Gaskell, June 1, 1853; September 1853; in Barker, ed., The Brontës: A Life in Letters, pp. 374, 376).

The Brontë myth is exemplified by the supernatural animation of the natural world. Gaskell reports hearing Brontë defend the uncanny moment at the end of Jane Eyre, for example, when Jane hears Rochester’s call, borne on the wind from miles away, by insisting that “ ‘it is a true thing; it really happened’ ” (p. 338). Similarly, Brontë explains that she experiences her sisters’ presence in the moors after their deaths: “ ‘There is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of [Emily]. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizons’ ” (p. 345).

Although Gaskell does not provide critical commentary on the novels, she does provide firsthand accounts of their composition, the most vivid of these being the ritual the sisters adopted of pacing up and down the dining room at night when they were developing their plots and conferring on drafts of their novels, a practice that Gaskell witnessed Brontë continue alone after her sisters had died: “Three sisters had done this,—then two... and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came,—and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound” (pp. 317-318).