The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Gaskell's successful biography helped to establish the Brontës' public image as a family characterised by literary genius and personal tragedy.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (Author)

9781108020503, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 September 2010

368 pages, 2 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.1 cm, 0.47 kg

Published two years after the novelist's death, this two-volume work is the first and the best-known of the many biographies of the Brontë family. Written by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65), the book was instrumental in the creation of the Brontës' public image as a family set apart by literary genius and personal tragedy. Gaskell's chief source for the biography was some 350 letters between Charlotte and her friend Ellen Nussey, letters which Charlotte's husband had asked Nussey to destroy after his wife's death, fearing they would damage her reputation. Volume 1 consists of 14 chapters and covers the Brontë ancestry, Charlotte's time at school and as a governess, her juvenilia, the 'deplorable conduct' of her laudanum-addicted brother Branwell, and the publication of her poems, along with those of her sisters Anne and Emily, in the volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846.

1. Description of Keighley and its neighbourhood
2. Characteristics of Yorkshiremen
3. The Rev. Patrick Brontë
4. Miss Branwell comes to Haworth
5. The old servant Tabby
6. Personal description of Charlotte Brontë
7. Charlotte Brontë leaves school, and returns home to instruct her sisters
8. Charlotte as teacher at Miss Wooler's school
9. Branwell Brontë still at home
10. Second experience of governess life
11. Mr. Brontë accompanies his daughters to Brussels
12. Charlotte returns to Brussels
13. Plan of school-keeping revived and abandoned
14. Publication of the poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]