Charlotte Brontë, a thirty-eight-year-old “spinster” of “no rank or profession,” married the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls on Thursday, June 29, 1854, at the church of St. Michael and All Angels in Haworth, where her father was the incumbent and her mother, her brother, and three of her four dead sisters were buried. Because at the eleventh hour Patrick Brontë, age seventy-seven, refused to attend the wedding of his last surviving child—hoping, by this ruse, to prevent the event from taking place—Charlotte was given away by her former teacher and employer Margaret Wooler. “It is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,” she wrote from her honeymoon to her school friend Ellen Nussey, who’d been the only other guest at the wedding.
It was perilous indeed: nine months later, after two and a half months of severe anorexia, nausea, and vomiting, the novelist joined her siblings in the family vault. The cause of her death was given as phthisis, suggesting that she died, like the other Brontës, from tuberculosis. It is more likely, however, writes Graham Watson in his immersive study The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, that she died from hyperemesis gravidarum, or extreme morning sickness. The control of her literary estate went to Nicholls, who after the wedding, according to Nussey, announced, “I did not marry Currer Bell, the novelist, but Charlotte Brontë, the clergyman’s daughter. Currer Bell may fly to heaven tomorrow for anything I care.” Nicholls, who had never approved of his wife’s intimacy with Nussey, later said that he “had no recollection whatsoever of such incident as that related.”
The funeral, on April 4, 1855, took place also at St. Michael and All Angels, which was seventy yards from the parsonage where Charlotte had lived since the age of four. Patrick Brontë had become rector of the church in 1820; his wife, Maria Branwell, then died in 1821 (age thirty-eight), followed in 1825 by his eldest daughters, Maria and Elizabeth (eleven and ten), in 1848 by his son, Branwell (thirty-one), and three months later by his fourth daughter, Emily (thirty), and five months after that, in May 1849, by his youngest child, Anne (twenty-nine). For the last six years of his long and tragic life, Patrick shared the parsonage with Nicholls, his long-time curate. The “hearts” of the villagers “shivered within them,” Elizabeth Gaskell wrote in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the book Patrick commissioned in 1855, “as they thought of the two sitting desolate and alone in the old grey house.” The paradoxical image of two men yoked in solitude was typical of Gaskell’s resourceful imagination.
Gaskell did not discover that Charlotte had died, or had even been ill, until she received a letter from John Greenwood, the stationer in Haworth. “How I wish I had known!” she wrote back from London, where the letter, redirected from her home in Manchester, arrived on the day of the funeral. “If I had come, I could have induced her.” Inducing premature labor “was absolutely necessary for her very life. Poor poor creature! I cannot understand it at all.” Having had seven children herself, four of whom reached adulthood, Gaskell believed that she might have recognized the symptoms of a difficult pregnancy and saved Charlotte from the mercy of her unworldly and negligent carers.
She had lost touch with Charlotte after the wedding because Nicholls forbade his wife to write to her, on the grounds that Gaskell was Unitarian rather than Anglican. “She would never have been happy but with an exacting, rigid, law-giving, passionate man,” Gaskell explained to her friend and fellow Unitarian, John Forster, when the engagement was announced in the spring of 1854. “Only, you see, I’m afraid one of his laws will be to shut us out.” Nicholls had similarly silenced Charlotte as a novelist, Nussey told Gaskell. “Arthur says I have no time for writing now,” Charlotte had told Nussey, “as I must attend to my duties as a clergyman’s wife.” Gaskell was a clergyman’s wife herself, as well as a successful novelist.
Greenwood, who described Charlotte to Gaskell as his “best friend,” also wrote to the social theorist Harriet Martineau to inform her of Charlotte’s death, not realizing that the two had not corresponded since February 1853, after Martineau’s damning review of Villette. The novel, the first in the language to describe a mind in a state of depressive breakdown, was “almost intolerably painful,” Martineau had written anonymously in The Daily News, the work of a writer morbidly obsessed with “the need of being loved.” On April 6, 1855, The Daily News published an anonymous elegy beginning, “Currer Bell is dead!,” which contained an informed account of Charlotte’s life in “those dreary wilds” of Haworth “where newspapers were never seen,” with a father “too much absorbed in his studies to notice her occupations” and “the graves of her sisters…before her window.” The author, Gaskell correctly guessed, was again Martineau.
Two months later another anonymous article appeared, this time in Sharpe’s London Magazine. Titled “A Few Words About Jane Eyre,” it began by reminding readers of the excitement, eight years earlier, generated by the “odd,” “improper” novel, which took “a little swarthy governess for heroine, and a middle-aged ruffian for hero,” and whose characters swore “real wicked oaths”: “Here was a strange book, written in a strange style, by—and this was strangest of all—a mysterious stranger” named Currer Bell. The writer then described the landscape from which Charlotte Brontë had been carved (“the wildest and bleakest moors of Yorkshire”), the charity school where her sisters had contracted the tuberculosis that killed them and where Charlotte had been “half starved,” her time teaching in Brussels, and the eccentric Irish father who took his meals alone in his study. The article closed by quoting the first impressions of Charlotte by “a lady, who later became intimate with Miss Brontë,” including a description of her “reddish complexion,” “wide mouth,” and “overhanging” forehead. She is “so short-sighted,” the lady added, “that she cannot see your face unless you are close to her,” and her hands “are like birds’ claws.”
Having read the article, Nussey wrote immediately to her nemesis, Nicholls:
I am sure both you and Mr Brontë will feel acutely the misrepresentations and the malignant spirit which characterises it…. I wish Mrs Gaskell, who is every way capable, would undertake a reply, and would give a sound castigation to the writer.
So on June 16, 1855, Patrick invited Gaskell to write the official life of his daughter; Nicholls, unable to stem the tide of Brontë mania, reluctantly conceded to his father-in-law’s “impetuous wish.” By telling the truth about Charlotte, Patrick argued, Gaskell would prevent any more opportunists from publishing lies in the newspapers. The author of this latest scurrilous piece, however, was “unquestionably,” Watson argues, Gaskell herself, aiming to receive precisely this request. Watson is surely correct: the article is an edited version of Gaskell’s own letters about Charlotte. “No quailing Mrs Gaskell!,” Patrick insisted on June 23, when the newly appointed biographer visited the widowers of Haworth parsonage. “No drawing back!”
Gaskell’s recent novel Cranford (1853) had described a community of women whose lives were shaped by gossip, and it was gossip that shaped her Life of Charlotte Brontë. She went at her research like a bloodhound, collating rumors, uncovering secrets, doorstepping the more reluctant witnesses, including Margaret Wooler and Nicholls himself, interviewing the local shopkeepers, the family servants, the former nurse, and the fellow students from Cowan Bridge School (depicted in Jane Eyre as the hellish Lowood) and those from Charlotte’s later school Roe Head, where Wooler had been a mistress and Ellen Nussey a pupil. Gaskell went to Brussels to meet Constantin Héger, the model for Villette’s Paul Emanuel, who showed her the masochistic love letters Charlotte had begun writing to him in 1844; she gained the confidence of Nussey, who lent her 350 other letters that, Gaskell discovered, served as Charlotte’s living autobiography. These letters, which Nussey had refused to burn despite Nicholls’s demand (sent via Charlotte) that she do so, formed the core of Gaskell’s narrative, allowing her subject’s voice to rise hot from the page. The emotional content of the letters to Héger, however, which Nicholls did not know about, she excluded.
Charlotte’s letters to Nussey, Gaskell wrote to her editor George Smith, who had discovered Currer Bell and published Jane Eyre before publishing The Life of Charlotte Brontë, proved that her “character as a woman was unusual to the point of being unique. I never heard or read of anyone who was for an instant, or in any respect, to be compared with her.” Gaskell’s version of Charlotte Brontë echoes Charlotte’s version of Emily Brontë. “I have never seen her parallel in anything,” Charlotte said of her sister. Gaskell’s heroine, as Watson puts it, “loved and suffered and died in ways that seemed emblematic of greater truths of life and suffering and death.” Charlotte labored, Gaskell wrote, beneath unendurable pressure: the “pressure of grief,” “a pressure of difficulties,” the “compulsory pressure of school,” “the constant pressure of misery,” “the constant pressure of anxiety,” “the gnawing pressure of daily-recurring cares.” She also suffered from depression, oppression, and suppression. “Am I to spend all the best part of my life,” Charlotte, age nineteen, wrote of her teaching career in her diary,
in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, & the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs, and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?
Gaskell’s purpose was the exposure of everyone responsible for Charlotte’s suffering. “Do you mind the law of libel?” she asked Smith. One of those she exposed was William Carus Wilson, Jane Eyre’s Mr. Brocklehurst, who was the founder of the Cowan Bridge School, where Charlotte had been malnourished and her elder sisters contracted tuberculosis. A less legitimate target was the former Mrs. Lydia Robinson, now Lady Scott, who had employed Branwell as her children’s tutor in 1843 and seduced him, wrote Gaskell, “in the presence of her own Daughters.” The affair was discovered by Mr. Robinson, and in 1845 Branwell returned to Haworth in disgrace. When Lydia Robinson, who was widowed a year later, cut contact with Branwell, he disappeared into opium and alcohol addictions: a servant recalled him “in a state of frenzy, walking round the table, clenching a knife in his hand, and wildly raving at the irrevocable decrees of damned fate.” Mrs. Robinson’s corruption of Branwell, Charlotte told Gaskell, who reported it to the world, led not only to his own death but to “the premature deaths” of the “innocent victims,” Emily and Anne, who were broken by their brother’s wretched decline. When he read Gaskell’s account of the affair, Patrick Brontë was delighted. “The Picture of my brilliant and unhappy Son, and his diabolical Seducer, are Masterpieces,” he told her. In Gaskell’s hands the “profligate” Lydia Robinson—who reasonably felt that Branwell was an equal party in the affair and that his disappointment had nothing to do with the death of his sisters—became the foil to the perfect Charlotte Brontë, much as the dazzlingly seductive Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park is the foil to Fanny Price.
Harriet Martineau found herself condemned by Gaskell as well, for her review of Villette. But Charlotte, Martineau said in her own defense, had insisted that she be as truthful as “a sister” in her criticisms of the book. “I love, I honour, I kneel to Truth,” Charlotte had written to Martineau, making her accusations of betrayal appear disingenuous. Had Martineau been Charlotte’s biographer, the story would have read very differently. Gaskell, Martineau believed, swallowed whole her friend’s exaggerations: the faults in Gaskell’s account came not from her false contrivances but from her trust in Charlotte’s distortions. In their own conversations about Branwell’s demise, said Martineau, Charlotte “never gave the least hint of the affair…. She simply said her brother died of his vices.” “I have long ceased to consider Charlotte Brontë truthful,” Martineau wrote when she discovered “the extraordinary representations” of herself in Charlotte’s letters, repeated in Gaskell’s book.
The Life of Charlotte Brontë, a biography by a novelist that asks to be read, wrote Christopher Ricks, as a “dramatic poem” or “masterpiece of religious literature,” was published in March 1857. The events, Gaskell writes, take place on a stage “terribly full of upright tombstones,” against a soundtrack lifted from Wuthering Heights: “On windy nights, cries, and sobs, and wailings seemed to go round the house, as of the dearly-beloved striving to force their way to her.” A second edition appeared in May, before being withdrawn from circulation in June after a deluge of complaints, including a statement from Lydia Robinson’s lawyers demanding a full retraction of the claims made about her. The book was revised and redacted in July, with the third—censored—edition, which has never been out of print, then appearing in November. “I am willing to do anything for a quiet life,” Gaskell told Smith. “Libellous or not,” Charlotte’s school friend Mary Taylor wrote to Nussey, “the first edition was all true.”
The Invention of Charlotte Brontë is an intelligent and impassioned account of the genesis and reception of Gaskell’s biography. Part 1 covers the years 1850 to 1854, when Charlotte, bowed beneath what Gaskell called “this pressure of grief which had crushed all buoyancy of expectation out of her,” befriended Harriet and Elizabeth and married Arthur. (Watson is on a first-name basis with his subjects.) Part 2 explores what Gaskell called the “hornet’s nest” of complaints, objections, and legal threats coming from “anyone whose name has been named,” as she despaired, “or whose grandmother’s great uncle once removed has been alluded to.” Watson’s focus throughout is on the four main players: stoic Charlotte, slippery Gaskell, adamantine Patrick, and insecure Nicholls. Stitching his story together from the novelists’ gossipy letters, including many from Charlotte to Nussey that Gaskell did not see or decided not to use, Watson marshals his material with maximum intensity, maintaining Gaskell’s narrative momentum, giving voice to the rage against Nicholls she was unable to express, and matching her rhetorical heights: “Broken in spirit,” he writes of Charlotte’s suffering, “she crawled, she knelt, then she tremulously stood until the hammer blows of tragedy rained upon her again.”
The biographer and her subject first met in August 1850 at the Lake District home of Sir James and Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, celebrity-hunters who besieged Charlotte with invitations after The Morning Post confirmed the rumors, in February that year, that she was Currer Bell. Charlotte, always a good hater, disliked Sir James (“The substratum of his character is hard as flint”), but she saw in Gaskell a “remote affinity” to her sister Emily. Gaskell, six years older than Charlotte, reported that they differed “about almost everything”: “Miss Brontë,” for example, “puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness.” Gaskell, who lived with a loving husband and a bevy of daughters in a happy house in Manchester, mixed easily with the lions of the day, among them William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, while Charlotte, a brittle introvert from a silent home, loathed being paraded around London literary salons as “the real Jane Eyre.”
But there were important similarities: both women lost their mothers as children; both lived in the north of England; both were deeply religious, bound by duty, exacting in matters of business, and storytellers to the core. To cover her shyness and earn her keep as a houseguest, Charlotte hypnotized her audience with what Watson calls “set-piece anecdotes” about her semicivilized childhood on the edge of a lonely moor. In December 1849, when she first met Martineau, Charlotte had volunteered “the history of her life,” as Martineau recalled, in a two-hour dialogue, but it was in Gaskell, whose “intuitive sympathy,” as Watson puts it, “flared through the darkness enclosing Charlotte Brontë,” that she found her “most responsive listener.”
Their August meeting “was the start,” writes Watson, “of Elizabeth winning intimacies, encouraging this deeply private woman to expose herself in confessions she could read aloud to her family then pass around for her friends’ amusement.” But the Charlotte Watson describes, who loaded her novels with her most brutal experiences, yearned for intimacy, and confided quickly in friends, does not seem deeply private and would need no encouragement to share her confidences. Watson is closer to the truth when he writes that “the life of Charlotte Brontë, as narrated by Charlotte Brontë herself, was reaching the ears of anyone willing to listen.” The popular novelist in Charlotte Brontë ignited the popular novelist in Elizabeth Gaskell: in this sense they invented each other.
“There are some people,” Gaskell told John Forster of this first meeting,
whose stock of facts and anecdotes are soon exhausted; but Miss B is none of these. She has the wild, strange facts of her own and her sisters’ lives—and beyond and above these she has the most original and suggestive thoughts of her own; so that like the moors, I felt on the last days as if our talk might be extended in any direction without getting to the end of any subject.
These “wild, strange facts” were repeated by Gaskell to her various friends in five separate letters written days after their introduction. Charlotte’s height, for example (four feet, eight inches) was worn by her like a badge of honor. She “never grew an inch,” she told Gaskell, after going to Cowan Bridge at the age of eight. She repeated the same story to Martineau, and to the Kay-Shuttleworth children when they refused to eat their dinner. Other “strange facts” came from Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, who had visited Haworth parsonage uninvited and then told Gaskell—who told the feminist hymn writer Catherine Winkworth, who passed it around her own sewing circle—what it was like. “Such a life as Miss B’s I never heard of until Lady KS described [it],” Gaskell wrote to Winkworth.
The village, Kay-Shuttleworth reported, consisted of “a few grey stone houses perched up on the north side of a bleak moor—looking over sweeps of bleak moors.” What should have been a garden was instead a courtyard “of turf & a stone wall—(no flowers or shrubs will grow there).” After The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in which the adjective “wild” appears forty-four times, had turned Haworth into a shrine to the weird sisters, a tourist wrote an article in The Bradford Observer saying that he had been led to expect “a scattered and straggling hamlet with a desolate vicarage and a dilapidated church surrounded and shut out from the world by a wilderness of barren heath” but found instead “a large and flourishing village…quaint, compact, and progressive.”
Kay-Shuttleworth also told Gaskell what she had heard about the “strange, half mad” father, who, for no obvious reason, sawed up the chairs in his wife’s bedroom during one of her confinements and put the hearth rug on the fire. Patrick Brontë, the most enigmatic figure in the panoply, did not at first object to the “strange facts” in Gaskell’s biography, which included burning his children’s boots because they were “gay and luxurious” and would “foster a love of dress,” working off “his volcanic wrath by firing pistols out of the back door in rapid succession,” and cutting into shreds one of his wife’s silk gowns that he considered improper. His initial response to the book was to thank Gaskell for affording him “more satisfaction than I have felt during many years of our life.” Aside from “a few trifling mistakes” that might be corrected in a second edition—such as the claim that he denied his children meat, thus weakening their constitutions (the opposite, he said, was the case), and the “Eccentric Movements” ascribed to him, which “have no foundation”—he was content. It took Nicholls to explain that Gaskell’s portrait of him as a madman was detrimental to his reputation, and only after being advised by his son-in-law did Patrick complain to Gaskell that “everything in that book which relates to my conduct to my family is either false or distorted.” Years later, when asked by a fellow member of the clergy how literally The Life of Charlotte Brontë should be taken, Patrick replied good-humoredly, “Mrs Gaskell is a novelist you know, and we must allow her a little romance, eh?”
Patrick’s lack of interest in the difference between facts and “a little romance” makes him a richer biographical study than Watson allows. According to Watson he was a careless and manipulative narcissist who blighted Charlotte’s life; according to Nussey he was a “villain”; according to Martineau he was a “monster”; and Gaskell based his character on Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. But the man Patrick most resembled, he himself believed, was one of Gaskell’s own creations: “The father of Margaret in North and South—peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful and generally well meaning.” Patrick, who changed his name from the prosaic Prunty to the exotic Brontë, provided the soil in which his daughters’ imaginations grew. Nussey recalled a visit she made to the parsonage in 1833, when he repeated the “strange stories” told to him “by some of the oldest inhabitants of the parish…stories which made one shiver and shrink from hearing; but they were full of grim humour and interest to Mr Bronte and his children.”
Patrick also devised unusual games. He told Gaskell that when Maria was ten and Anne was four, he placed all six siblings in a line, gave them a mask to pass between them, so they could speak with less timidity, and asked each a question. Eight-year-old Charlotte was asked to name “the best book in the world.” “The Bible,” she answered, with “the Book of Nature” coming second. Her answer was precocious but not, as her father believed, remarkable: she said what was expected of a Victorian clergyman’s daughter. It was the exercise itself that was remarkable, and it is hard to believe the claim, made by both Charlotte and Patrick, that this father never again displayed the least curiosity about his children’s inner lives or suspected for one moment, until he was shown their published books, that behind another set of masks the young women in his house were pulsating with what Gaskell called a “creative power carried to the verge of insanity.”
Arthur Bell Nicholls first came to Haworth in 1845, a climactic year in the life of the Brontës. His job as curate was to assist the vicar in his parish duties, and he was a daily visitor to the parsonage where Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, each having failed in their teaching careers, were all now back home. Branwell, who returned in July, was writing secret love letters to Lydia Robinson; Charlotte, having returned from the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels in January 1844, was writing secret love letters to her (also married) “master,” Héger; Anne, who had been governess to the Robinson children, had resigned her position in shame; and Emily was producing the poetry that Charlotte determined should be published. While Patrick read in his study and Branwell ranted in his bedroom, the sisters, whispering in the parlor, took the curate’s name for their noms de plume: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It was evidently a form of mockery: curates, Charlotte wrote to a friend that year, were a “self-seeking, vain, empty race.”
“In silence he had watched her, and loved her long,” Gaskell wrote of Nicholls, nearing the end of her tale. His marriage to Charlotte, Gaskell wrote, had been happy, and their happiness would have increased. It is not known for how long Nicholls had watched and loved her, but his interest may have begun when he read Shirley (1849) and found what he took to be a flattering portrait of himself in the figure of Mr. McCarthy: “Being human, of course he had his faults…. Otherwise he was sane and rational, diligent and charitable.” Aside from sanity and diligence, Nicholls, an Irishman of Scottish parentage, was an unexceptional figure; Gaskell, who privately thought him “very stern and bigoted,” described him in her book as “a grave, reserved, conscientious man.” Marrying Charlotte Brontë was the only interesting thing he ever did, and this would not have happened had her life not become a memento mori.
His marriage proposal, in December 1852, was dramatized by Charlotte in a letter to Nussey that was quoted by Gaskell. After leaving Patrick’s study one evening, he “tapped” on the parlor door:
Like lightning it flashed on me what was coming. He entered—he stood before me…. The spectacle of one ordinarily so statue-like—thus trembling, stirred, and overcome gave me a kind of strange shock. He spoke of sufferings he had borne for months—of sufferings he could endure no longer.
Gaskell withheld Charlotte’s description of how, when she told her father what Nicholls had said, the veins on his temples “started up like whip-cord” and “his eyes became suddenly blood-shot,” but she shared with her readers that Charlotte rejected Nicholls, who duly resigned his curacy. She held back that he planned to immigrate to Australia, and then withdrew his resignation and returned to his duties in Haworth, before resigning again and moving to a curacy near Pontefract, forty miles away.
For sixteen months Patrick remained steadfast in his refusal, but Charlotte fought her corner. In an argument with her father that she recounted to Gaskell, who repeated it in a letter to John Forster (but did not include in her biography), Charlotte said, “Father, I am not a young girl, not a young woman even. I never was pretty. I now am ugly…. Do you think there are many men who would serve seven years for me?” When Patrick then asked if Charlotte must marry, of all professions, a poor curate, she replied, “I must marry a curate if I marry at all; not merely a curate, but your curate; not merely your curate but he must live in the house with you, for I cannot leave you.”
Patrick was not alone in his low assessment of Nicholls. No one much liked him, including, until latterly, Charlotte herself. “His narrowness of mind always strikes me chiefly,” she wrote to Nussey on his appointment. “A cold, far-away sort of civility are the only sort of terms on which I have ever been with Mr Nicholls,” she reported, again to Nussey, when he had been in the parish for a year. Emily, who “had no time for the unimaginative,” treated Nicholls with “uncompromising contempt,” Charlotte told Nussey with evident pride. She “would dive past him without a word,” while Anne thought of him “as no news at all.” Nicholls was equally disliked by the parishioners, who hoped when he went to Ireland to visit his family in 1847 that he would not return. When he offered his resignation after Charlotte’s rejection in 1852, he received from the parish an enthusiastic farewell.
One month after his proposal, Villette was published. The novel would have made difficult reading for Nicholls: whoever had been the original of Paul Emanuel, Catherine Winkworth speculated in a letter to a friend, was clearly Charlotte’s great love. Perhaps he too, Winkworth speculated, had been lost at sea? For once, Watson notes, Charlotte was the rejecter rather than the rejected, and she observed with interest the curate’s performance of a passionate lover as he starved himself and sobbed in public, she reported, “as women never sob.” “He never was agreeable or amiable and is less so now than ever,” Charlotte wrote to Nussey. Was his gloom, she wondered, evidence of “true affection—or only rancour and corroding disappointment”? Would she, by accepting him, be in receipt of “genuine attachment,” or was she, by rejecting him, “escaping the yoke of a morose temper”?
“I believe I do right in marrying him,” Charlotte wrote in a flat, final letter to George Smith when her father eventually gave his permission. “My expectations, however, are very subdued, very different I daresay to what yours were before you were married.” As the wedding day drew nearer, Patrick, Charlotte, and Nicholls were all ill with anxiety. Seeing how “she indulged and placated her father,” writes Watson, Nicholls—still living near Pontefract—told Charlotte that he was at death’s door. “But you know dear Nell,” Charlotte reported to Nussey, “when people are really going to die they don’t come a distance of some fifty miles to tell you so.”
“I do fear a little for her happiness,” wrote Gaskell to a friend at the time, “just because he is narrow and she is not.” But Charlotte’s happiness was the ending Gaskell needed: reader, she married him. The marriage was happy, Watson concedes, insofar as Charlotte discovered the novelty of being protected. She was welcomed by Nicholls’s Irish family; with her husband by her side she gained confidence. Having “elevated” Nicholls “beyond her expectations,” she now, Watson writes, “wondered if it was she who was not yet worthy of him.” Nicholls, who cast himself as Charlotte’s hero, was turned by Gaskell into one of literary history’s minor characters, while Watson places him among the men who “harried and manipulated” an abused woman already broken by “a lifetime of emotional starvation and grief.” “Poor CB was lost upon them,” said Gaskell of Patrick and Nicholls, and Watson agrees. In 1860, after her final visit to Haworth, Gaskell reported that Nicholls was “more unpopular in the village than ever; and seems to have even a greater aversion than formerly to any strangers visiting his wife’s grave; or indeed to any reverence paid to her memory, even by those who knew and loved her for her own sake.”
In 1861, after Patrick died, age eighty-four, Nicholls returned to Ireland and married his cousin. Gaskell, who died suddenly four years later, age fifty-five, regretted that she had ever agreed to undertake The Life of Charlotte Brontë. “I don’t think there ever was such an apple of discord as that unlucky book,” she told George Smith. Watson’s own book is both a tribute to Gaskell’s hagiography and a necessary afterword. His Charlotte is cannier, more complex, less certain of herself—a woman who exploited the dramatic potential of her situation before trading her genius for what he calls “serfdom” to a low-wattage man. Watson defends, while being baffled by, the character of Mrs. Charlotte Nicholls, but her trajectory is not unusual. It is Gaskell, independent wife, loving mother, and successful writer, who stands alone in the annals of nineteenth-century women novelists.
The heroine of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë is not Charlotte herself, or even Gaskell, but the “invisible woman” Ellen Nussey, the novelist’s archivist and Gaskell’s co-conspirator, who “both denied she had collaborated with Elizabeth and complained that she had not been credited enough.” Nussey, who died in 1897, lived to see the parsonage become a tourist attraction. But the gray house, she wrote, was not where the Brontës had lived: “They lived in the free expansive hill moorland—its purple heather, its dells and glens and brooks, the broad sky view, the whistling winds, the snowy expanse, the starry heavens.” Her script might have been written by Elizabeth Gaskell.
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