The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Published two years after the novelist's death, this two-volume work is the first and the best-known of the many biographies of the Brontë family. Written by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), the book was instrumental in the creation of the Brontës' public image as a family set apart by literary genius and personal tragedy. Gaskell's chief source for the biography was some 350 letters between Charlotte and her friend Ellen Nussey, letters which Charlotte's husband had asked Nussey to destroy after his wife's death, fearing they would damage her reputation. Volume 1 consists of 14 chapters and covers the Brontë ancestry, Charlotte's time at school and as a governess, her juvenilia, the 'deplorable conduct' of her laudanum-addicted brother Branwell, and the publication of her poems, along with those of her sisters Anne and Emily, in the volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846.