GASKELL AND THE BRONTËS Literary Manuscripts of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) and the Brontës from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Writing to an autograph collector, Elizabeth  Gaskell’s widowed husband William regretted that no reliable likeness of her survived. ‘I’m  sorry  to  say  there  is  no  good  photograph  of  my  dear  wife’, Mr Gaskell wrote in August 1879, fourteen years after her death: ‘The only one, indeed, which exists … does not at all do her justice’. But if a photographic record of  Elizabeth Gaskell’s physical appearance has only inadequately been preserved, she left behind a substantial corpus of letters, many held in the Brotherton Library, and other personal writings, that provide a different, more convincing picture.
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The collection of Elizabeth Gaskell’s correspondence is the largest in the world.  There are many letters to her daughters, Marianne (Polly), Margaret (Meta), Florence (Flossy) and Julia, and to her sisters-in-law, Eliza Holland and Nancy Robson.  These tell us much about her concerns, her views of literature, and her life at home with the Rev William Gaskell.
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Particularly rich in nineteenth-century material, Lord Brotherton’s extraordinary collection included a major set of poetic manuscripts by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and associated correspondence. A substantial amount of material relating to Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was given to the Library together with a considerable collection of manuscripts by the Brontë family, concentrating on those of the unhappy and ill-starred brother of the novelists, Branwell Brontë. The Brontë and Gaskell material – its purchase guided by W. J. Wise and Clement Shorter – formed already a significant collection when Lord Brotherton died and successive librarians at Leeds have added to it.
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“a little lady in black silk gown, whom I could not see at first for the dazzle in the room; she came up & shook hands with me at once. I went up to unbonnet &c. came down to tea, the little lady worked away and hardly spoke; but I had time for a good look at her. She is (as she calls herself) undeveloped; thin and more than ½ a head shorter than I, soft brown hair not so dark as mine; eyes (very good and expressive looking straight & open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth and many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad, and rather over-hanging. She has a very sweet voice, rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort, admirable and just befitting the occasion. There is nothing overstrained but perfectly simple.” Thus Elizabeth Gaskell’s first impression of Charlotte Brontë, whose controversial Life of Charlotte Brontë she would publish in  1857. Brontë appears under this scrutiny in poor condition – ‘tiny’, ‘reddish face’, missing teeth, undeveloped. Much of the rest of Gaskell’s account in the Winkworth correspondence dwells on the hardships of living at Haworth and with the ogre ..... Gaskell perceives as the half-mad Patrick Brontë. The seeds of her later sturdy criticism of the sisters’ home and father are obvious. Patrick, she told Catherine Winkworth, was subject to fits of rage which he visited in violence not on people but on household objects; he sawed up dining room chairs despite the pleas of his sobbing wife, he filled a room with choking smoke as he angrily burnt a hearthrug to exorcise some personal demon. He was, in Gaskell’s reckoning, a man utterly careless of  his children. He ‘never taught the girls anything’, she claimed, he barely expressed a word at the publication of Jane Eyre, and was indifferent to their comfort. ‘“At 19”’, Gaskell says Charlotte told her, ‘“I should have been thankful for an allowance of 1d [one penny] a week. I asked my father, but he said What did women want with money[?]”’
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“… Have you heard that Harriet Martineau has sworn an eternal friendship with the author of Shirley, if not I’ll tell you. She sent Shirley to Harriet Martineau. H.M. acknowledged it in a note directed to Currer Bell Esq. - but inside written to a lady.Then came an answer requesting a personal interview. This was towards or about last Saturday week, and the time appointedwas 6 o’clock on Sunday Even[in]g and the place appointed was at Richard Martineau’s (married a Miss Needham) in HydePark Square, so Mr & Mrs R. Martineau and Harriet M. sat with early tea before them, awaiting six o’clock, & their mysterious
visitor, when lo! and behold, as the clock struck in walked a little, very little, bright haired sprite, looking not above 15, very unsophisticated, neat & tidy. She sat down & had tea with them, her name being still unknown; she said to H.M. ‘What do you really think of Jane Eyre’? H.M. I thought it a first rate book. Whereupon the little sprite went red all over with pleasure. After tea, Mr & Mrs R. M. withdrew, and left sprite to a 2 hours tête a tête with H.M. to whom she revealed her name & the history of her life. Her father a Yorkshire clergyman who has never slept out of his house for 26 years; she has lived a most retired life; - her first visit to London, never been in society and many other particulars which H.M is not at liberty to divulge any more than her name, which she keeps a profound secret; but Thackeray does not. H.M. is charmed with her; she is full of life and power &c. &c. & H.M. hopes to be of great use to her. There! that’s all I know, but I think it’s a pretty good deal, it’s something to have seen somebody who has seen nominis umbra. …”
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A letter from CB to Mrs Smith, mother of her publisher (Smith, Elder & Co)  dated 1 July 1851
Extract: “She is a woman of many fine qualities and deserves the epithet which I find is generally applied to her - charming. Her family consists of four little girls - all more or less pretty and intelligent - these scattered throughout the rooms of a somewhat spacious house - seem to fill it with liveliness and gaiety.”
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Elizabeth Gaskell. AMs describing her visit to Haworth, Sep 1853
Extracts: “We turned up a narrow bye lane near the church - past the curate’s, the schools & skirting the pestiferous churchyard we arrived at the door into the Parsonage yard. In I went, - half blown back by the wild vehemence of the wind which swept along the narrow gravel walk - round the corner of the house into a small plot of grass, enclosed within a low stone wall, over which the more ambitious grave-stones towered all round.”  “Miss Brontë gave me the kindest welcome, & the room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness & comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture….” “Before tea we had a long delicious walk right against the wind on Penistone Moor which stretches directly behind the Parsonage going over the hill in brown and purple sweeps and falling softly down into a little upland valley through which a ‘beck’ ran, & beyond again was another great waving hill, - and in the dip of that might be seen another yet more distant, & beyond that the said Lancashire came; but the sinuous hills seemed to girdle the world like the great Norse serpent, & for my part I don’t know if they don’t stretch up to the North Pole. On the moors we met no one. Here and there in the gloom of the distant hollows – with Scotch firs growing near them often, - & told me such wild tales of the ungovernable families who lived or had lived therein that Wuthering Heights seemed tame comparatively. Such dare-devil people, - men especially, - & women so stony and cruel in some of their feelings & so passionately fond in others. They are queer people up there.” GASKELL_and_THE_BRONTES

Life of Charlotte Bronte

When Charlotte died, her biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, portrayed Charlotte in the same light. So, despite the fact that both sisters had studied abroad in Brussels, where Charlotte developed a crush on Constantin Heger, her mentor and a married man, and later wrote impassioned letters to him, the sisters were seen as inspired but unlettered innocents. Arlindo-correia
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The Life of Charlotte Bronte is the posthumous biography of Charlotte Brontë by fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Although quite frank in places, Gaskell suppressed details of Charlotte's love for Constantin Heger, a married man, on the grounds that it would be too great an affront to contemporary morals and a possible source of distress to Charlotte's still-living friends, father and husband.The first edition was published in 1857 by Smith, Elder & Co.. A major source was the hundreds of letters sent by Brontë to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey.-- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.more...
ebooks.search elizabeth
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On the bicentenary of Gaskell’s birth, editor of the Oxford Classics edition of the Life, Professor Angus Easson spoke to the Brussels Brontë Group about the role of the Group’s home town in Gaskell’s research, and the problems caused by reporting on the Brussels years. 


Having accepted the invitation from Patrick Brontë to write the life of his daughter Gaskell was keen to bring the same “charm of locality and sense of detail” to the Life that had already characterised her novels Mary Barton, Cranford and North & South. She quickly realised that a visit to Brussels was needed. Like Professor Easson himself, she visited the cathedral, Royal Park and Belliard steps that feature in the novel, as well as many key Villette locations since destroyed.

Gaskell’s investigations were however made more delicate by the fact that when Villette was translated into French, the fictitious city name was changed to ‘Bruxelles’. Individuals portrayed in the novel were thus left with even less to mask their identity and felt understandably wary of welcoming a second English novelist into their homes. 

Undaunted, French-speaking Gaskell made contact with locals including the widow of the former English chaplain and the Brussels chief of police. Although failing to win an audience with Madame Heger (the inspiration for the almost certainly slanderous character of Madame Beck), Gaskell was able to meet with Charlotte’s beloved Monsieur Heger (Monsieur Paul). 

Her careful investigations were not however enough to stop debate around the accuracy of the final book: a debate which continues today. brussels bronte
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I wonder what Elisabeth thought and felt after she found out about the feelings from Charlotte Bronte for Constantin Heger.

Charlotte Bronte passed away in 1855, a celebrated author just 38 years old. Her friend and fellow author Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in 1857. Gaskell interviewed Constantin Héger for the book but decided not to write about Charlotte’s inappropriate feelings for a married man.

I wonder what Elisabeth thought and felt after she found out about the feelings from Charlotte Bronte for Constantin Heger. She wanted to write a biography for her friend and found out about something only a few people knew. Emily knew it, maybe Ellen Nussey knew it. But the rest of the world did'nt. Must she be the own to publish? 

I wonder, did Elizabeth ask for advice? I am searching for some answers. Maybe you have an idea? Please, let me know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

It would take over half a century for the truth to come out. In 1913, Constantin and Claire’s son Paul Héger donated Charlotte’s letters to the British Museum and allowed them to be published in the Times. Belgian coal magnate and art collector Raoul Warocqué read the letters in the paper and coveted them. He wrote to Paul asking if there were any more extant Brontë letters that he could buy. There were not, but Paul had another Brontë memento he was willing to part with: Charlotte’s handwritten manuscript of L’Ingratitude.

Warocqué’s collections are now in the Musée Royal de Mariemont. Brontë scholar Brian Bracken was looking through the Musée Royal’s catalog looking for information on Vital Héger, Constantin’s brother, when he found a reference to a manuscript by Charlotte Brontë. It wasL’Ingratitude, forgotten since 1914.

“THE SORT . . . OF PEOPLE TO WHICH I BELONG”: ELIZABETH GASKELL AND THE MIDDLE CLASS By ALLISON JEAN MASTERS

While Gaskell’s entire characterization of her subject aims to “show what a noble, true, and tender woman Charlotte Brontë really was” (396), meaning middle class and feminine, I will touch on two illustrative instances, dress and love, the knowledge and handling of which attest to Gaskell’s middle-class status as much as Brontë’s.  Dress stands out as one of the many seemingly trivial matters that Gaskell highlights in her biography in an effort to help middle-class readers, particularly of course women readers, relate to Charlotte Brontë. Modern feminist scholars are Masters 89 particularly inclined to recognize clothing as a socially meaningful element of Victorian life, and according to Langland, “details of dress, always associated with status, took on increasing subtlety as indicators of class rank within the middle classes. Likewise, dress historian Rachel Worth believes that “the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell are extremely enlightening . . . for their delineation of class as construed through specific styles of dress and specific fabrics 

In The Life, then, clothing presents a possible problem as asign of Brontë’s failure in the realm of middle-class femininity, since, for example, her sister “Emily had taken a fancy to the fashion, ugly and preposterous even during its reign, of gigot sleeves, and persisted in wearing them long after they were ‘gone out.’ Her petticoats, too, had, not a curve or a wave in them, but hung straight and long, clinging to her lank figure” (166). Furthermore, beyond this association with her unfashionable sister, Brontë had apparently failed to clothe her fictional characters appropriately, for in her review, Rigby insinuates that the author must be a man as “no woman attires another in such fancy dresses as Jane’s ladies assume” (111). Through careful maneuvering on Gaskell’s part, however, such alleged ignorance of flattering and socially-appropriate apparel serves as another illustration of how Brontë eventually transcends the disadvantages of her early life. Recurring references to clothing function first as a sign of Brontë’s early social deprivation, then as learning experience, and ultimately as evidence of her “gentle breeding” rather than social ignorance (311). As in many of her fictional works, including Cranford and Wives and Daughters, in The Life, Gaskell reaffirms the importance of dress as a marker of class status and femininity, drawing on the specifically upper middle-class “emphasis . . . on subtle understatement in apparel” rather than ostentatious displays of fashion (Langland 35).

To reach the point where readers see Brontë as simply and elegantly dressed as befitting her middle-class position, Gaskell first has to grapple with the public knowledge that as children the Brontë girls had “strange, odd, insular ideas about dress” (166), as their Belgian schoolfellows noticed when Charlotte and Emily Brontë lived abroad to study French. To account for this social ignorance in terms of fashion, Gaskell locates several contributing factors, including the lack of shops for “dress, or dainties” in Haworth (39), the early death of Mrs. Brontë which left Mr. Brontë to raise daughters (nearly) without female aid, and their spinster Aunt Branwell’s hopelessly out-of-date sense of style. 


Thus, in writing about Brontë as a teenager, Gaskell asks her readers to “think of her as a little, set, antiquated girl, very quiet in manners, and very quaint in dress” (75), though, importantly, through no fault of her own. For one, as an evangelical clergyman, “Mr. Brontë wished to make his children hardy, and indifferent to the pleasures of eating and dress,” and as the knowledgeable Gaskell confirms, “in the latter he succeeded, as far as regarded his daughters” (42). Likewise, Aunt Branwell “on whom the duty of dressing her nieces principally devolved, had never been in society since she left Penzance, eight or nine years before, and the Penzance fashions of that day were still dear to her heart” (75). Noble or kind as their intentions ma have been, neither Mr. Brontë nor Aunt Branwell manage the household with the kind of success Gaskell imagines in her character Mrs. Gibson from Wives and Daughters, who recognizes the importance of selecting appropriate, class-signifying clothing for the young women of a middle-class household.  

Fortunately, at least in Gaskell’s opinion, Brontë rectified this early disadvantage in terms of clothing once she experienced the wider world and discovered her innate “feminine taste” and “love for modest, dainty, neat attire” (356), which could so appropriately signal her position as a respectable woman of limited means. To show this transformation from “very quaint in dress” to fashion-conscious, Gaskell brilliantly allows Brontë to speak for herself through quotations from personal letters. 

In 1851, for example, Brontë wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey, requesting assistance with the purchase of some “lace cloaks, both black and white,” and she spends a full paragraph 

enumerating the details involved in this fashion decision (qtd. in Life 356). Of this letter, Miller suggests that it “lets us share an everyday private moment between two female friends, but is also used by Gaskell as proof of Miss Brontë’s ‘feminine taste’ and ‘love for modest, dainty, neat attire,’ moral indicators of her irreproachable womanliness” (67). While Miller correctly assesses how the letter contributes to Gaskell’s feminine picture of Brontë, we should remember that this instance is one of the more positive references to dress in the biography, occurring late in the second volume, and after the publication of  Jane Eyre.

The earlier passages in The Life, in which Gaskell deliberately mentions the poor and strange clothing the Brontës wore, make such later references to cloaks, bonnets, gloves, and scarves all the more relevant. In the manner of Gaskell’s fictional heroine Molly Gibson, as the protagonist of The Life, Brontë matures in her sense of style and thus her womanly appeal. In turn, tainted by a penchant for “preposterous” sleeves and petticoats, Emily Brontë, as Jay suggests, is once again “offered up as the scapegoat” (xx), while her more sociable sister Charlotte learns how to present herself properly and in accordance with modern taste. A sign of Brontë’s true success in mastering the art of dressing is the reaction, or rather lack of one, from the ever style-conscious Gaskell upon their first meeting. Although she gossiped freely in her letter to Catherine Winkworth about Brontë’s “undeveloped” body, “altogether plain” face, and unique childhood, Gaskell apparently found nothing to criticize in terms of dress in the “little lady in a black-silk gown” (Letters 123). 
Read on: etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/

I don’t think there ever was such an apple of discord as that unlucky book. (Elizabeth Gaskell to George Smith, 26 November 1857)

I am curious 

about the backgrounds

of the biography

Elisabeth Gaskell 

made from Charlotte Bronte

I am going to search for background information.

On 16 July 1855, Patrick Brontë wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, acknowledging her as the person “best qualified” to write an account of Charlotte’s life and works, and asking if she would agree to the task (SHB. XV. 190-191).  Within a week, Gaskell arrived at Haworth Parsonage to discuss the biography.  From the beginning, she intended to do much more than  the “brief account of [Charlotte’s] life and . . . some remarks on her works” for which Patrick had asked

(XV. 190).  She wrote to Ellen Nussey:

I told Mr Brontë how much I felt the difficulty of the task I had undertaken, yet how much I wished to do it well, and make his daughter’s most unusual character (as taken separately from her genius,) known to those who from their deep interest and admiration of her writings would naturally, if her life was to be written, expect to be informed as to the circumstances which made her what she was (Letters 361)

Gaskell’s biography was to be a tribute to both the woman and the writer; she also intended it to be an expression of their treasured friendship, as she said in her letters both before and after the book’s publication.  Indeed, before she had even been approached by Patrick Brontë, she had written to Charlotte’s publisher, George Smith, that she longed to “publish what I know of her, and make the world . . . honour the woman as much as they have admired the writer” (345).  And when the “unlucky book” was published, and Gaskell was “in the Hornet’s nest with a vengeance” (453) from those unhappy with their particular portrayals, she stood true to herfriend’s memory, asking Charles Kingsley to “[r]espect & value the memory of Charlotte Brontë as she deserves” (452), and telling Ellen Nussey:

I weighed every line with all my whole power & heart, so that every line should go to it’s [sic] great purpose of making her known & valued, as one who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave & faithful heart. (454)

Gaskell had mourned Charlotte’s passing; indeed, she most likely still mourned her, or at least she expected to: My dear dear friend that I shall never see again on earth! . . . I loved her dearly, more than I think she knew.  I shall never cease to be thankful that I knew

her: or to mourn her loss. (335-336) Thus, as Pollard says, Mrs. Gaskell wrote with a “tender concern” that highlighted the “profound attachment” she had for Charlotte Brontë (Mrs Gaskell 142-143), a woman she considered “truth itself” (Letters 128).  If, indeed, her purpose was to exalt Charlotte’s goodness (Pollard 146), it was also certainly sincere.  Gaskell’s purpose was to write an account of Charlotte just short of hagiography, and she never claimed otherwise: I appeal to that larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius, and how to reverence with warm, full hearts all noble virtue. To that Public I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë. (Life 429) Wise and Symington state that, though the friendship between Elizabeth and Charlotte was brief, “[n]ever, anywhere, do we find a single jarring note” (SHB. XV. 61).  It is appropriate that the friendship between these two extraordinary women be emphasised, for in the nineteenth century, a friendship like theirs was considered most rare. lang/EG

Here you can read an opinion completely different: guardian/classics.charlottebronte 
Since her death 150 years ago, Charlotte Brontë has been sanitised as a dull, Gothic drudge. Far from it, says Tanya Gold; the author was a filthy, frustrated, sex-obsessed genius.
Elizabeth-Cleghorn-Gaskell

On this day in 1857 The "Life of Charlotte Bronte" by Elizabeth Gaskell was published.

Charlotte sent copies of Shirley to selected leading authors of the day, including Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell and Charlotte subsequently met in August 1850 and began a friendship which, whilst not necessarily close, was significant in that Gaskell would write a biography of Charlotte after Charlotte's death in 1855. The biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was published in 1857 and was unusual at the time in that, rather than analysing its subject's achievements, it instead concentrated on the private details of Charlotte's life, in particular placing emphasis on aspects which countered the accusations of 'coarseness' which had been levelled at Charlotte's writing. Though frank in places, Gaskell was selective about which details she revealed; for example, she suppressed details of Charlotte's love for Heger, a married man, as being too much of an affront to contemporary morals and as a possible source of distress to Charlotte's still-living friends, father and husband. Gaskell also provided doubtful and inaccurate information about Patrick Brontë, claiming, for example, that he did not allow his children to eat meat. This is refuted by one of Emily Brontë's diary papers, in which she describes the preparation of meat and potatoes for dinner at the parsonage, as Juliet Barker points out in her recent biography, The Brontës. It has been argued that the particular approach of The Life of Charlotte Brontë transferred the focus of attention away from the 'difficult' novels of not just Charlotte but all the Brontë sisters, and began a process of sanctification of their private lives. answers/charlotte-bronte


Then came in 1857 the Life of Charlotte Brontë, in two volumes. Miss Bronte, who had enjoyed the friendship of Mrs. Gaskell and had exchanged visits, died in March 1855. Two years earlier she had begged her publishers to postpone the issue of her own novel Villette in order that her friend's Ruth should not suffer. This biography, by its vivid presentation of the sad, melancholy and indeed tragic story of the three Brontë sisters, greatly widened the interest in their writings and gave its author a considerable place among English biographers. But much matter was contained in the first and second editions that was withdrawn from the third. Certain statements made by the writer as to the school of Charlotte Brontë's infancy, an identification of the "Lowood" of Jane Eyre with the existing school, and the acceptance of the story of Bramwell Brontë's ruin having been caused by the woman in whose house he had lived as tutor, brought threats of libel actions. Apologies were published, and the third edition of the book was modified, as Mrs. Gaskell declares, by "another hand." The book in any case remains one of the best biographies in the language  nndb.com/people