Robert Browning: How to Know Him Book

Mrs. Gaskell continues to serve overwritten Victorian treacle dedicated to the memory of Charlotte Brontë in this second volume. The introduction by Alan Shelston in the 1975 edition points out Mrs. Gaskell's omissions and deletions (some due to Charlotte's main correspondent, Ellen Nussey), and her anxiety to please both Charlotte's father Patrick, and her husband Arthur Nicholls. This volume covers the Brontë sisters' literary success and then the quickly following deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne within nine months' time. Charlotte recovers after a period of grief and depression, and goes on to exchange letters and visits with the literary people of the day, including Thackeray, whom she counts as the greatest living author of her time. Despite her London visits, and her widening circle of acquaintance, she persists in an almost pathological shyness and a dread of meeting new people. The introduction claims that Mrs. Gaskell shaped the Life of Charlotte Brontë to her own morbid and moral purposes, and painted Charlotte's life as bleaker than it actually was. But even without her sentimentalizing, the bare facts of Charlotte Brontë's life are bleak enough. The saddest fact is the needlessness of her own death, the result of a pregnancy which seemed ill-advised given Charlotte's weak constitution and the high maternal mortality rate of the day. Still, it's consistent with the prevailing religiously-tinged fatalism of the time, as well as Charlotte's self-abnegating character as she is portrayed in the Life.