Her sublimely inaccurate portrait was followed by works of various other biographers, who managed to fill their books with material more extravagant than anything to be found in a Brontë novel. She was already a famous novelist, but she reserved her finest fictional touches for her life of Charlotte Brontë.
Gaskell, possibly the most credulous and most sentimental biographer of the nineteenth century, began the process. The world soon knew that there had been three women of genius, untutored and unloved, immured within a house as bleak as any prison or asylum, insulted by a drunken and manic brother, oppressed by a stern and occasionally violent father, finding their relief only in wonderful little treks across the Yorkshire moors. The received story of the Brontës was not so sanguinary, but it was equally sensational. Smith could hardly have guessed that he was present at the birth of a literary legend as powerful as that of Marlowe’s murder or Chatterton’s suicide. Her younger sister Anne had a manner “curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal.” Emily, the middle sister, had remained at home in Yorkshire, where she kept house and fed the dogs. Smith as “too large for her body” she might just as well have been a missionary, or even a cook.
Charlotte was undistinguished, with a head that struck Mr. Smith’s most famous author was a woman-and a provincial woman at that. “It was addressed to me.” So it was that the secret of the Brontë sisters was revealed. “From the post office,” Charlotte Brontë replied. It was addressed to Currer Bell, the somewhat notorious male novelist best known as the author of “Jane Eyre.” “Where did you get this from?” Smith asked her. In July, 1848, the publisher George Smith found waiting for him in his London office two “rather quaintly dressed little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking.” The smaller and plainer of them, wearing glasses, came up to him with a letter in her hand.
It is one of the most charming stories in English literary history. Art work by Patrick Branwell Brontë / Photograph from Getty
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