The Life of Charlotte Bronte Read Online Free PDF Page B

acute source of moral contagion within the parsonage itself, however, in the shape of Brontë’s brother, Branwell, whose struggle with alcoholism and opium addiction resulted in premature death. “Think of her home,” Gaskell exhorts the reader who would fault Brontë for want of delicacy, “and the black shadow of remorse lying over one in it, till his very brain was mazed, and his gifts and his life were lost” (p. 245). In Gaskell’s estimation Branwell’s sins range from denying his sisters’ dream of independence—his evident debauchery being the reason they were unable to start a school at the parsonage—to the more strained claim that the “many bitter noiseless tears” Brontë shed on his account weakened her eyesight (p. 219).
    The Brontës viewed Branwell as the most promising artist among them. Accordingly, they were prepared to make sacrifices to forward his education. Brontë’s letters evidence the pressure she and her sisters felt to relieve their father of the financial burden of their maintenance so that he could support Branwell’s attendance at the Royal Academy of Arts. All three sisters went out as governesses, although they were ill suited to the work, which Brontë termed “‘slavery’ ” (p. 115). Gaskell generalizes the plight of the Brontë sisters with a feminist apostrophe: “These are not the first sisters who have laid their lives as a sacrifice before their brother’s idolized wish. Would to God they might be the last who met with such a miserable return!” (p. 107). Branwell never entered the Royal Academy; the reason why is unknown. Instead, he cycled through a series of jobs, ending in a position analogous to that of his sisters, as tutor to a prominent local family, the Robinsons of Thorp Green Hall.

Evasions
    While at Thorp Green Hall, Branwell allegedly engaged in a sexual relationship with Lydia Robinson, the wife of his employer. No proof has been found, but Branwell’s assertions that Robinson was one “whom I must, till death, call my wife” (Branwell Brontë to Francis Grundy, October 1845; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 367) and his dismissal in the summer of 1845 for behavior that his employer characterized as “bad beyond expression” are suggestive (p. 222). If Gaskell melodramatically represents the Brontë sisters as victims of Branwell’s profligacy, she is even more extravagant in absolving Branwell from responsibility for the Robinson affair. Gaskell rests most of the blame with Robinson, noting that this “case presents the reverse of the usual features; the man became the victim.” In Gaskell’s telling Branwell is merely one of a number of “innocent victims, whose premature deaths may, in part, be laid at her door” (p. 223).
    Not surprisingly, Robinson, who had remarried and become Lady Scott by the time the Life appeared, threatened Gaskell with a libel suit. All unsold copies of the Life were pulled from the shelves, a revised edition issued, and a public retraction printed in the Times (May 26, 1857). This injured Gaskell’s personal credibility and raised questions about the factual accuracy of the Life generally: It begged the question of why Gaskell should place such emphasis on an episode tangential to Brontë’s history.
    As one contemporary reviewer observed, because the Life was written so soon after Brontë’s death and many of those concerned in it were living, the text is fissured by suppressions and evasions that occasion us “to read between the lines” (Easson, p. 381). The Robinson episode is one. Gaskell had to provide a compelling reason for Brontë’s aggravated depression at the end of her stay in Brussels and after her return to Haworth in January 1844, which resulted from her unrequited attachment to a married man, Constantin Heger. Heger was Brontë’s literature teacher at the school she attended in Brussels, which was run by his wife. Brontë was later employed there as an English teacher.