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Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë is one of the great English biographies.

The two women had been friends, and some months after Charlotte’s death in 1855 the Reverend Brontë asked Mrs. Gaskell to compose a memoir of his daughter.

The book appeared in 1857 and the author rushed off to Rome for a holiday.

Her celebration was soon disturbed by protest. Threats of legal action forced her to make alterations and deletions in the second edition and it was not until almost fifty years later that the original version could be read again.

Mrs. Gaskell’s aim had been a true record of her friend’s life with some underlining of Charlotte Bronte’s “noble” character in order to counteract the accusations of “coarseness” and unruly emotionalism leveled at Jane Eyre and Villette.

She suppressed certain findings – the most important was the real truth about Charlotte’s experience in Belgium and her falling in love there with M. Heger.

She rushed forward with certain other details, such as the truth about the Clergy Daughters’ School and, more important, an account of Branwell’s relation or infatuation with Mrs. Robinson.

Branwell had gone as a tutor to the Robinson family, where his sister Anne also held a post. He fell in love with Mrs. Robinson, and was turned out of the house by the husband. There was nothing for Branwell to do except to return to Haworth in love and in disgrace, filled with impetuous longings and hysterical hopes.

Mr. Robinson was somewhat older than his wife and soon died. When the news reached Branwell he allowed himself to believe he would now be sent for by his beloved. Instead Mrs. Robinson sent a courier with quite another message, one saying untruthfully that her husband had left her money in his will only on condition that she never see Branwell again. The news was given to Branwell at the Black Bull and here is Mrs. Gaskell’s account of his feelings:

More than an hour elapsed before sign or sound was heard; then those outside heard a noise like the bleating of a calf, and on opening the door, he [Branwell] was found in a kind of fit, succeeding the stupor of grief which he had fallen into on hearing that he was forbidden by his paramour ever to see her again, as if he did, she would forfeit her fortune. Let her live and flourish! He died, his pockets filled with her letters…. When I think of him, I change my cry to heaven. Let her live and repent!

Mrs. Gaskell’s work is written with perfect sympathy, an experienced and inspired feeling for detail, and the purest assurance of style. Naturally it did not please in every respect. The father endured but made a list of deeds and traits wrongly attributed to him; Mr. Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband, was pained to have Mrs. Gaskell reveal so fully Charlotte’s early lack of enthusiasm for his proposal of marriage.

Some have defended Emily from a rather bleak portrait by the author; servants gave a happier and healthier account of the parsonage diet than that found in the biography. Out of the withholdings on the one hand and the rash unfoldings on the other Mrs. Gaskell created some vexations for herself and left room for the efforts of future scholars.

Her biography is not only about Charlotte but contains the life of the entire family and certainly, appearing early as it did, gave a tremendous lift to the literary fortunes of the sisters and a boost to the “Brontë story.”

The book, in addition to being a marvelous work in itself, records the basic material: the town of Keighley, the Haworth parsonage, the anecdotes of home and school, the deaths, the letters, the poignant gifts and hard work of the sisters.

Winifred Gérin, a contemporary Brontë scholar, has spent seventeen years studying the life of the family and has lived for ten years in the village of Haworth. She has taken the family one by one: Anne Brontë, 1959; Branwell Brontë, 1961; Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of a Genius, 1967, recently reissued; and in 1971 her final volume, Emily Brontë. Of these volumes the most interesting is the study of Charlotte Bronte. She lived longer than the others and her life was more filled with incident.

Mrs. Gérin does her work in a capable and thorough Bronte Society manner. She is an enthusiast, and rather exuberant and traditional in matters of style, and thus there is a good deal about “the beloved moors.” She knows what is known at the moment and knows it so surely that she convinces us everything has been discovered, found, filed.

In matters of interpretation she is not daring but tends more to an insistence on certain small points.

In Emily Brontë a mystical, mysterious genius is sketched and colored, but no one and no amount of fact can give flesh to Emily Bronte’s character. She is almost impossible to come to terms with, to visualize. At one moment — more violent in Mrs. Gaskell, toned down in Mrs. Gérin – Emily is brutally beating her dog about the eyes and face with her own fists in order to discourage him from his habit of slipping upstairs to take a nap on the clean counterpanes. At another time she is a reverent, pantheistic brooder.

A good deal is made in this book of the emotional strains between Emily and Charlotte. Charlotte’s indiscretion in reading the Gondal poems when she found them lying open on a table is more damaging to the sisters’ friendliness in Mrs. Gérin’s account than in others.

There is no doubt about Emily’s reserve, her hesitation about publication. Still it seems worthwhile to remember that she did help with the preparation of the book of poems and its failure did not deter her from pressing on with her novel Wuthering Heights nor from sending that to a publisher and even writing him about her work on another novel, never finished and now lost.

Mrs. Gérin is very interesting in her presentation of Emily’s feeling for Branwell – the most dramatic and deep emotion of her life if we have pieced that life together properly. Quite convincingly, she thinks that Emily’s awkward, difficult nature, her own inability to find a life for herself outside her father’s house, made her more sympathetic with the defenses and failures of her brother. Whether the sympathy, the tacit acceptance of responsibility for Branwell came from the absence of other claims in her life we cannot know.

His sufferings over Mrs. Robinson were taken at face value by the family, anxious like himself to have some frame into which to put his appalling indulgences, his decline into delirium tremens and utter debilitation of body and spirit. They were willing to believe that his had been a fatal love, a curse.

Emily Bronte’s life was as narrow as she could make it; her effort was to reduce her daily prospects and she had far fewer friends than Charlotte. She was away from home only four times: twice in boarding school, once as a teacher, and later in Brussels with Charlotte. All of these “experiences” were painful and abandoned with eagerness.

Some of the trouble lay in her unbending nature. She was “stronger than a man, simpler than a child.” There was no hope, in Emily Brontë, for conventional feminine behavior, plausible attitudes and manners. In certain ways she seems more damaged and suffering than her sisters, more doomed to solitude and to an inwardness somewhat frightening.

The blindness to the critics to Wuthering Heights is perhaps not an unexpected adversity for a work of such brilliant, troubling force. It was called “a disagreeable story,” and pronounced “gloomy and dismal.” Another reviewer wrote, “We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which represents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity.” When the strength and newness of the book were acknowledged, its power was called “a purposeless power.”

Charlotte Bronte was perplexed by it and in her introduction to a new edition printed after Emily’s death said, “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” The unremitting tension of Wuthering Heights was at variance with Charlotte’s mixture of romantic elements and didactic realism.

The last years of Emily Bronte’s life are distressing to think about. Her writing stopped and nothing remains from the years 1846 to 1848, when she died at the age of thirty. It is not known whether she destroyed her papers or whether Charlotte, too much bound by her own clarity and reasonableness, judged the unprinted papers not worth preserving.

Mrs. Gérin believes Emily’s “voices” disappeared. Her work, leaning more upon inspiration than that of her sisters, less subservient to the dominion of the will, might well have slipped into a pause at the end.

There was also her draining dedication to Branwell. “Long after all the Brontë family were dead Emily’s goodness to Branwell in his degradation was still village talk. Stories abounded of her waiting up at night to let him in and carry him upstairs when he was too drunk to walk.”

Branwell was like a pestilence. He slept all day and stayed up half the night raving. Once he set the bed on fire when he was deeply drugged.

“Happening to pass his open door and see the flames, Emily shot down to the kitchen for a ewer of water, before anyone else had recovered from the shock or been able to rouse the supine Branwell.” After this the father took Branwell to sleep in his room.

When Branwell died, there was immediately an inexplicable downward rush to death for Emily also. She had, according to all reports, been healthy, but she never went out again after Branwell’s funeral and three months later she herself was dead.

During the interval she spoke hardly at all, would not give consideration to her failing body.

Charlotte was appalled by “the great emaciation, her breathlessness after any movement, her racing pulse…her exhausting cough.” Emily refused medical care, yielding only to Charlotte’s frenzy of fear on the last day. When the doctor finally arrived she was dead.

Charlotte’s account of Emily’s death is intensely moving:

Emily’s cold and cough are very obstinate…. Her reserved nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It is useless to question her; you get no answers. It is still more useless to recommend remedies; they are never adopted…. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything.

There may have been a suicidal feeling in Emily’s essential nature. In her poems and in her novel, death appears more perfect than life; it stands ahead as the ultimate liberty and freedom. “Thou would’st rejoice for those that live, because they live to die….”