Read Online The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell - Free Book Online

angered Brontë by referring to her publicly as “Jane Eyre,” a conflation that she felt effaced her artistry. She was not Jane Eyre; she had created Jane Eyre.
    Gaskell conducted her own literary career with uncompromising professionalism, famously locking horns with Charles Dickens over creative differences when she wrote for his periodical Household Words. But her ambivalence about Brontë’s work persisted well into their friendship. “The difference between Miss Brontë and me,” Gaskell explained to a friend, “is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing, and out of her life; and my books are so far better than I am that I often feel... as if I were a hypocrite” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Both Brontë and Gaskell saw their work as therapeutic. Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in an attempt to exorcize her grief over the death of an infant son. Brontë found relief from loneliness in the life of her imagination after the deaths of her sisters. “ ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking... its active exercise has kept my head above water since; its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God, who gave me the faculty; and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift, and to profit by its possession,’ ” Brontë told Williams (p. 320).
    Where Brontë sees writing as a form of solace and pleasure, Gaskell loads it with the corrective function of “normalizing” the self by working out unhealthy energy. Women’s participation in the “hidden world of art” is beneficial if it “keeps them from being morbid,” Gaskell believes, but if “Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is not doubt of that—and that is part of the danger in cultivating the Individual Life” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68).
    Gaskell feared that Brontë’s desire to write and to be heard was a self-indulgence that was abnormal and not strictly womanly. As Gaskell described it in a letter to a friend, Brontë had a “ ‘desire (almost amounting to illness) of expressing herself in some way’ ” (p. 436).
    So desirous was Brontë of recognition, that she sent samples of her work to Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate, just before her twenty-first birthday. Southey recognized her talent, but discouraged her from pursuing a literary career, saying that “ ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,’ ” and promising that the woman who is “ ‘engaged in her proper duties’ ” . . . is “ ‘less eager for celebrity’ ” (p. 123). Brontë’s response seemed a model of contrition, and it pleased Southey as such, but it was carefully veiled rebellion (p. 125). Her letter fairly drips with sarcasm in the guise of naive acceptance: “ ‘You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures... You kindly allow me to write... provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do ... I am afraid, sir, you think me very foolish. I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end; but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote’ ” (p. 124).
    Brontë’s original letter is not extant, but judging from her response it sounds as if she first approached Southey in an inauthentic voice that she here disowns. Brontë smartly assures Southey that she knows and does her duty She explains that as the daughter of a clergyman of limited income she has been forced out into the world as governess. “ ‘In that capacity,’ ” Brontë affirms, “ ‘I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and hands too, without having a moment’s time for one dream’ ” (p. 124).
    Brontë’s avowal of domestic responsibility