Free The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell

socially responsible work. On her final trip to London, Gaskell explains, Brontë was free to make her own itinerary and she elected to see “ ‘the real in preference to the decorative side of life,’ ” visiting Newgate and Pentonville prisons, Bethlehem Hospital for the insane, and the Foundling Hospital. “All that she saw during this last visit to London impressed her deeply,” Gaskell reports, “so much so as to render her incapable of the immediate expression of her feelings.” “If she had lived,” Gaskell predicts, “her deep heart would sooner or later have spoken out” (p. 423).

Conclusions
    Gaskell came to know Brontë more completely through her research for the Life than she did through their friendship, which was of relatively brief duration and, as stated above, may have suffered in intimacy from Brontë’s strategically conforming to social standards when she thought it would please Gaskell. What impressed Gaskell most in reading Brontë’s personal correspondence was the degree to which her voice and “spirit” varied “according to the correspondent whom she was addressing” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 274). Bronte did not adopt the irreverent, rakish swagger in her letters to Gaskell that she did in those to Branwell, nor did she display the astringent sarcasm (which Gaskell quietly censored without a telltale ellipsis in the Life) that animates her anonymous letter to the critic and minor poet Hartley Coleridge, who had failed to appreciate her work. Gaskell also saw the “wild weird” writing of the juvenile period that she felt bordered on “delirium” (p. 72). Gaskell allows a “fac simile” of a page of one of these miniscule manuscripts to stand in for proper analysis, perhaps deterred by their balder articulation of eroticism and participation in the supernatural than is found in the mature works, and by the irreverent cynicism of Brontë’s male narrators of the Angrian period (p. 73).
    Gaskell saw her primary role as that of elegist, celebrating not the work, but the life of her “dear friend, Charlotte Brontë” (p. 18). To that end, Gaskell employs her full arsenal of literary technique. Pathos is the currency of the Life because reader empathy is integral to Gaskell’s vindication project. Gaskell’s repetition of key themes and her layering of the voices of eyewitnesses, family, and friends lend the Life an authority and intensity that no other biographical study of Brontë shares. With these “viva voce glimpses into her [Brontë’s] daily life” Gaskell creates a circle of acquaintances around Brontë of which the reader feels a part (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 154). Gaskell employs one of Brontë’s own favored devices, direct reader address, to create a conspiratorial feeling between author and audience. (Brontë often used it for the opposite effect, to distance the reader or to anticipate reader hostility.) Gaskell does not address her memoir to any general audience, but rather to those who “know how to listen” (p. 267). She turns from “the critical, unsympathetic public,” to appeal to a “larger and more solemn public, who know how to look with tender humility at faults and errors; how to admire generously extraordinary genius.” Gaskell addresses posterity here, a public she envisions as both broader and more broadminded than Victorian society. “To that public,” Gaskell declares in the Life’s concluding line, “I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë,” entrusting the reader with a heavy charge (p. 454).
    While the Life seems transparent, it is not. Gaskell is skilled at manipulating point of view. Although she seems to give the reader un-mediated access to Brontë’s voice through personal correspondence, Gaskell carefully culled and edited that correspondence; she staged Brontë’s voice, and in so doing she stripped that voice of some of its power and pique. Despite Gaskell’s self-effacing comment that “the