The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Annotated)

The Classic Biography by Elizabeth Gaskell | Critical Edition with Contextual Essays | Erato Press

De: Elizabeth Gaskell

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The most important literary biography in the English language — written by a novelist about a novelist, by a friend about a friend, and published four months after Charlotte Brontë's death.

When Elizabeth Gaskell sat down in 1855 to write the life of Charlotte Brontë, she faced a problem no biographer had faced before: her subject was both a woman and a genius, in an age that was uncertain whether those two things could coexist. The woman who had written Jane Eyre — who had scandalized reviewers, been accused of coarseness and immorality, been suspected of being a man — needed to be explained to a world that had already made up its mind.

What Gaskell produced, after two years of interviews, letters, and journeys across Yorkshire, was something that permanently changed how the Victorian world understood Charlotte Brontë — and, in doing so, permanently changed how we read her novels. The Life of Charlotte Brontë is not merely a record of a life. It is an argument: that the woman who wrote those books was shaped by conditions of poverty, isolation, and loss so extreme that her fiction was not an escape from them but a direct expression of them. That the wildness of Jane Eyre was not immorality but truth.

The biography opens at Haworth itself — the parsonage on the moor, the graveyard at the door, the village below — and builds outward from that landscape into a life. Charlotte's childhood, the deaths of her sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters' School; her years at Roe Head; the disastrous months in Brussels and what happened there; the writing of Jane Eyre in secret; the discovery of her identity by the literary world; the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne in quick succession; her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls; and her death, at thirty-eight, in the parsonage where she was born.

Gaskell knew Charlotte personally. She had visited Haworth. She had corresponded with her for years. The result is a biography that reads like a novel — because it was written by one of the great Victorian novelists, about the other.

This edition includes: ✦ The complete unabridged text of both volumes of Gaskell's biography — all twenty-eight chapters ✦ Charlotte Brontë in Context: Life, Works, and Legacy — a critical essay by Henry Bugalho examining the historical and social context, the Brontë family and Haworth, Charlotte's literary achievement, and the merits and limitations of Gaskell's account ✦ Elizabeth Gaskell: A Life in Letters and Fiction — biography of the biographer: her life, her novels, her friendship with Charlotte, and her legacy

For readers who enjoy: ✦ Biographies of women writers and the Victorian literary world ✦ Charlotte Brontë's complete works including Jane Eyre, Villette, and Shirley ✦ Literary biography and memoir in the tradition of the great Victorian life-writings ✦ Works by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and the tradition of Victorian women's fiction

I wished to tell the truth about a woman who was at once the most solitary and the most courageous person I had ever known. — Elizabeth Gaskell