The Gothic coloring of this passage is a prime example of Gaskell allowing the imaginative liberty of the novelist to take precedence over the literalism of the biographer. And yet there is an underlying psychological truth that Gaskell captures through pathetic fallacy. “ ‘The great trial,’ ” Brontë explained of her sisters’ loss, to Ellen Nussey, her lifelong friend, “ ‘is when evening closes and night approaches. At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room—we used to talk.’ ” In her sisters’ absence, Brontë found herself consumed by their dying moments, remembering “ ‘how they looked in mortal affliction,’ ” and thinking of the “ ‘narrow dark dwellings’ ” in which they were laid, “ ‘never more to reappear on earth.’ ” “ ‘This nervousness is a horrid phantom,’ ” Brontë acknowledges (pp. 312-313).

As a novelist, Gaskell understood that there is an emotional truth that is more compelling than bare factual accounting. The Life exists on the border between documentary accuracy and a novelistic verisimilitude that Gaskell believed to be more authentic. To borrow the dichotomy between what is “real” and what is “true” that Brontë develops to express what she does not like about Jane Austen’s novels, there is a greater emotional truth to the Life that diminishes, if not excuses, its representational lapses (p. 276). Brontë feels that Austen’s unsentimental choice to represent life “without poetry, maybe is sensible, real,” but she finds it “more real than true” (p. 276). As Gaskell characterizes it, she always tells the truth in the Life, although she might not tell the whole truth: “I came to the resolution of writing truly, if I wrote at all; of withholding nothing, though some things, from their very nature, could not be spoken of so fully as others” (p. 420). Gaskell is less interested in strict reportage than she is in creating a sensibility of heightened romantic coloring that she believes is faithful to Brontë’s own mode of self-presentation.

The Life partakes of Brontë’s own strategies of self-representation in nuanced ways. In her diary paper for 1829, for example, the teenaged Brontë records a typical evening at home with her sisters, including a memory of her dead sister Maria. “ ‘Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book. It was an old geography-book; she wrote on its blank leaf, “Papa lent me this book.” This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me. While I write this I am in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Haworth; Tabby, the servant, is washing up the breakfast-things, and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eldest), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes which Tabby has been baking for us. Emily is in the parlor, brushing the carpet’ ” (p. 70). This passage is significant for its “graphic vividness” as Gaskell notes. Maria, the departed sister, is as present as Emily and Anne. She has inscribed herself in the geography book and in Brontë’s consciousness, and she plays an ongoing role in family activities. Gaskell captures this collapse of past into present, this presence in absence in the Life and animates her narrative with a psychological rhythm that she found in Brontë’s own personal writing. G. H. Lewes praised the “psychological drama” of the Life, asserting that “fiction has nothing more wild, touching, and heart-strengthening to place above it” (Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, p. 386).

Gaskell’s interest in Brontë was animated as much by her life as by her work: “I have been so interested in what she has written. I don’t mean merely in the story and mode of narration, wonderful as that is, but in the glimpses one gets of her, and... of the way in [which] she has suffered” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72).