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Charlotte Brontë

Elizabeth Gaskell: The life of Charlotte Brontë

"I am sure the more fully she - Charlotte Brontë - the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife, is known - the more highly she will be appreciated." Mrs Gaskell was quite clear about her priorities when she began to set down the facts of a "wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it".
The result was one of the greatest of all English biographies. The book itself was not to be without its stormy passage: Mrs Gaskell, as well she knew, ran up against Victorian shibboleths of propriety and sexual prudery. However, not even the amendments and cuts she was obliged to make in the second and third editions could destroy its overall unity or her psychologically convincing vision of the suffering, emotionally starved and tortured Charlotte Brontë whose life and pitiful death still grips and appalls us.
The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in notes and appendices.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was born in London, but she spent her formative years in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Manchester's Cross Street. As well as leading a busy domestic life as minister's wife and mother of four daughters, she worked among the poor, traveled frequently and wrote.
The life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell
ISBN: 0140434933