The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Three sisters put away their sewing at nine o'clock and paced the parlour of a Yorkshire parsonage, reading aloud the stories they were writing in secret. Elizabeth Gaskell had this from the last of them, her friend, and when Charlotte Brontë died she went up the grey road from Keighley to Haworth to gather the rest. What she made is a novelist's biography, built from letters by the hundred: the charity school where two elder sisters caught the fever that killed them, the brother drinking himself out of the world, the evening Charlotte decided the heroine of Jane Eyre would be plain, small, and unattractive, in defiance of the accepted canon. Gaskell's argument still stands: a woman who wrote became two people at once, Currer Bell the author and Charlotte Brontë the woman, and the duties of each nearly destroyed the other. She was so unsparing about that school, and about Branwell, that the publishers withdrew the book. Everything the world believes about the Brontës began here.