Upon meeting Brontë for the first time, Gaskell telegraphed out accounts to all of her acquaintances. “Such a life as Miss B’s I never heard of before,” she informs one (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 75). “The wonder to me is how she can have kept heart and power alive in her life of desolation,” she tells another (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 79). Gaskell has long been charged with manufacturing the myth that Brontë’s life was one of “monotony and privation of any one to love,” and the Life’s main themes of isolation, emotional deprivation, and chronic ill health are now often dismissed by critics as products of Gaskell’s sentimentalism, but it seems that Brontë herself participated in the formation of this impression.

When Gaskell began her acquaintance with Brontë in August 1850, it was at a time of bereavement for Brontë, who had lost all three of her siblings to tuberculosis in quick succession, from September 1848 to May 1849. Her grief was exacerbated by her decision to prepare a new edition of her sisters’ novels, Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne’s Agnes Grey (1847), to which she planned to append a selection of their poetry. Rereading her sisters’ work “ ‘occasioned a depression of spirits well nigh intolerable,’ ” Brontë told Nussey in September 1850. Brontë found that her grief intensified, rather than diminished, over time: “ ‘I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the solitude and isolation of my lot’ ” (p. 361). She described being “haunted” by recollections of her sisters that grew “intolerably poignant,” magnified both by her imagination and by her solitude (pp. 361, 371).

During their initial meeting Brontë supplied Gaskell with a concise but thorough account of her life up to that point, rounding off her pathetic description of the recent deaths of her sisters with the prediction that her own “death will be quite lonely; having no friend or relation in the world to nurse her, & her father dreading a sick room above all places” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 75). Brontë, having been exposed to tuberculosis, understandably feared that her own death might be imminent, and her statement need not be read as purely melodramatic. It does not accurately reflect the objective truth of her situation, however. She had a very close friend, Nussey, and the housekeeper, Tabby, who was more like family than a servant, to care for her. It does reveal a sense of the emotional and intellectual isolation that Brontë felt in no longer being a member of a creative sisterhood. As such, it constitutes an appeal for Gaskell’s understanding and friendship, born of an urge to forge a new literary sisterhood. Brontë emphasizes her personal tragedy and fragility perhaps to offset the incendiary nature of Jane Eyre, whose reputation preceded her, in approaching the more conventionally feminine and socially acceptable Gaskell. Gaskell certainly came away from this meeting with the feeling that Brontë needed her protection, a feeling that is symbolized by her recollection that Brontë’s tiny hands felt like “the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm” (p. 77). If the Life sentimentalizes Brontë and her suffering, Brontë was complicit in that construction.

“Morbidity”

Brontë’s cast of mind when she met Gaskell was partly the result of recent sorrow and partly an ongoing psychological reality for Brontë, whose letters indicate that she endured a lifelong struggle with depression. Although she is sometimes evasive about its cause, Gaskell confronts the emotional intensity of Brontë’s depression unflinchingly. Her directness caused one penetrating reviewer to observe that the “inconsiderate” reader would regard the Life as “an unhealthy book” because it “discusses sick minds almost without admitting that they are unsound” (Easson, p. 382). Gaskell wavers between assigning a “constitutional” or physiological cause to Brontë’s depression, and deeming it the product of “this pressure of grief which had crushed all buoyancy of expectation out of her” (p. 95). She cautions the idle critic who would condemn Brontë’s work as “morbid” to remember how death swept her “hearthstone bare of life and love” (p. 297).

Gaskell traces the origin of Brontë’s “hopelessness” to the loss of her mother and her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, when she was still a child (p. 95).