THE INVENTION OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Deeply researched account of the novelist’s final years and the furor that greeted Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of her friend.

Watson opens in 1850, when Brontë was still hiding behind a pseudonym despite the curiosity stirred by the popularity of her novels. Gaskell read Shirley in 1849 and, sensing the grief that underpinned it—Brontë had lost her brother and two sisters in the space of six months—wrote a note to “Currer Bell”; she received an invitation to the parsonage at Haworth and met the quiet, tiny woman who had written those fiery books. After her death in 1855, Brontë’s father, spurred by a magazine article he considered distorted, asked Gaskell to write an authorized biography. Little did he know that she was already planning one and had written the offending article based on Brontë’s confidences. “Once certain of sympathy, [Brontë] produced set-piece anecdotes about how the comfortless childhood produced an isolated adulthood,” Watson writes in a key passage, calling those anecdotes “a story of self-justification and self-glorification honed over years, which in 1850 met its most responsive listener: Elizabeth Gaskell.” While not unsympathetic to Brontë, Watson makes it clear that she carefully crafted her image to revenge herself, perhaps unconsciously, on those who had failed to love and nurture her: her selfish, demanding father and her late-life husband, Arthur Nicholls, who understood little about her genius. Watson provides a riveting account of Gaskell’s intrepid ferreting out of witnesses to Brontë’s early life, many of whom had their own agendas in shaping her image—as did Gaskell. Outraged cries of libel from those painted as villains in the biography, and the hurt feelings of father and husband, forced Gaskell to delete material from subsequent editions; an excessively detailed account of the elaborate negotiations leading to those revisions is the only flaw in Watson’s brilliant reappraisal of a much-chronicled life.

An essential addition to the vast shelf of Brontëana.