The Life of Charlotte Bronte Read Online Free PDF

feminine or delicate either in expression or subject matter. Reviewers objected particularly to Brontë’s frank treatment of female desire, but the angry subtexts of her novels, which debunked religious hypocrisy and decried social inequity, also rankled Victorian audiences who found such criticism especially insupportable from the pen of a woman. “Conventionality is not morality,” Brontë admonished her critics in her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. “Self-righteousness is not religion.” One reviewer, Elizabeth Rigby, branded Jane Eyre a “dangerous” book, calling its heroine “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit,” and condemning the novel’s “murmuring against God’s appointment” and its “proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man.” The review culminates in an ad hominem attack that impugns Brontë’s character as a woman. “If we ascribe the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex,” Rigby pronounced (Allot, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, pp. 109, 111).
    In the face of vicious public attacks such as this one, Gaskell felt that she had a “grave duty” to protect her friend’s reputation—both literary and personal (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 245). As part of her recuperative task, Gaskell cannot emphasize enough the strange “otherness” of the Yorkshire people Brontë lived among, maintaining that even an inhabitant of neighboring Lancashire is struck by their “peculiar force of character” (p. 18). “For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë,” Gaskell explains, “it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed” (p. 18). Gaskell characterizes Brontë as “one who has led a wild and struggling and isolated life,—seeing few but plain and outspoken Northerns, unskilled in the euphuisms which assist the polite world to skim over the mention of vice” (p. 297).
    To some degree Gaskell’s prejudice reflects Brontë’s own, and her defense takes its cue from Brontë’s “Biographical Notice” of her sisters, which prefaced the posthumous edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that Brontë prepared for her publisher, Smith, Elder and Company in 1850. The great theme of the “Biographical Notice” is of contagion. Brontë describes her sisters as unconscious victims of what they observed, thus finding an external explanation for the disturbing elements of their work. Emily was contaminated not through direct contact with the Haworth locals, but through their lore, which unconsciously shaped her imagination. “In listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress,” Brontë explains. She maintains that Emily “did not know what she had done” in writing Wuthering Heights. Anne “hated her work,” Brontë insists, but “believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail” of the dissolute characters she drew as a warning to others (p. 282). Brontë characterizes both of her sisters as unwilling scribes, whose subjects were forced upon them by the exigencies of life.
    Similarly, Gaskell maintains that Brontë was “utterly unconscious” of “what was, by some, deemed coarse in her writings,” and she urges the reader to “remember her strong feeling of the duty of representing life as it really is, not as it ought to be” (p. 425). The offending elements of Jane Eyre are copied from life, Gaskell explains, while the scenes drawn from Brontë’s “own imagination... stand out in exquisite relief from the deep shadows and wayward lines” of the “wild and grotesque” scenes of life she witnessed around her (p. 244).
    Gaskell locates the most