Is it bad that I enjoyed reading about the Brontes more than some stuff by them? Elizabeth Gaskell is a hoot - she's funny and thoughtful and lets her imagination run away with her just enough to enrich but not undermine her meticulous research. The Life of Charlotte Bronte is well put together too - appropriating material about Charlotte and her family from letters that the subject wrote to her school friends, some publishers and a few other acquaintances as well as info from interviews Gaskell sought out with Charlotte's friends and father after her death.
The importance of The Life of Charlotte Bronte as a feminist piece - the first biography of a female novelist by another female novelist - is not lost on me, and I'm sure it accounts for the thoroughness of Gaskell's dedication to verisimilitude. The status of the female novelist was a major subject of concern for all the Bronte sisters, and for Gaskell herself throughout her life. Charlotte, Emily and Anne famously adopted the pen names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell while trying to publish their work - fearing that their work would be discriminated against or just dismissed as women's writing. A letter from Charlotte to one of her reviewers argues this point so strongly and eloquently in Gaskell's book - it's actually the most passion we hear from the eldest surviving Bronte outside of her own novels.
My favourite part of Gaskell's biography is where she tries to put in a good word for Emily - whom Charlotte loved above all others, but who comes across in all accounts from outside the family as the prettiest and most obviously brilliant sister, but certainly high-maintenance and probably more than a bit anti-social. I've always been a fan of the tortured weirdo artist school of genius anyway so all that made me like Emily more and Gaskell is so polite that none of the worst stuff that we now know about the Brontes (well mostly Branwell) now appears beyond a vague, charming illusion in the book or is reconfigured as an illustration of the sisterly love and concern the Bronte girls had for one another, their father, and brother.
Gaskell's biography of Charlotte works so well because they were contemporaries, peers and friends. Gaskell understood the pressures and problems Charlotte and her sisters faced in regards to earning a living through teaching and writing but by virtue of her close friendship with Charlotte she also caught a rare glimpse of the personal lives and relationships among this very private and territorial family. As a biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte is fascinating as it contains so much of the authors own sensibilities and feelings while painting a vivid and very believable picture of the inner workings of Charlotte, mostly in her own words. Gaskell's account of the troublesome Branwell, emo Emily, saintly Anne and kind, down-to-earth Charlotte was the beginning of a mythmaking process that grew around the Brontes then and continues unabated and ever increasing in fantasy to this day - the book is practically fanfiction, and all the better for it! I think more biographers should feel such a reasonable but very real emotional stake in the reputation and appreciation of their subjects.
It's really good dudes - go read it!
****/***** (I'd have made it four and half stars out of five if I could but we don't have a key for that)
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