Fate and weak tea
Hilary Spurling Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography Winifred Germ n (Oxford University Press £5.75) It is now more than twenty years since Winifred Gerin moved to Haworth and set about the Brontës: her monumental Charlotte Brontë was published in 1967, followed by Emily Bronte and preceded by lives of Anne and Branwell (as well as a biography of their father by Miss Germ's husband and W. T. Dixon). Admirers of thisextraordinary, interlocking, overlapping saga may well sympathise with Mrs Gaskell's remark when Frantley Parsonage first appeared in serial parts: 'I don't see any reason why it should ever come to an end, and everyone I know is always dreading the last number'.
One may perhaps still hope that the Haworth parsonage story is not over yet, at any rate while there remains one member of that household—the formidable Aunt Branwell—without a life to herself. Meanwhile few will cavil to see work suspended in favour of a biography of Elizabeth Gasket] whose Life of Charlotte Bronte is not only (with the possible exception of Wives and Daughters) her masterpiece but also inextricably bound up with Miss Gerin's own. It came out in 1857, exactly two years after Charlotte's death, and immediately plunged Mrs Gaskell into a nightmare of recriminatory letters, libel threats, lawsuits, retractions and apologies; the first edition sold out, the second was withdrawn and the third was so cut and mangled that its author washed her hands of it for good. The chief trouble came from the adulterous Mrs Robinson, at whose door Mrs Gaskell had laid the blame for Branwell's death, and from Carus Wilson, founder of the infamous school at Cowan Bridge where Charlotte watched her two older sisters die; but the book is riddled with distortions, mistakes and miscalculations which have done insidious damage ever since.
The saddest of these concerns Mr Brontë, who had asked Mrs Gaskell to write the book, praised it with prophetic generosity at a time when she most needed encouragement, and treated his own appearance in it with a charming mixture of forbearance, stoicism and amusement. It is an episode from which he emerges with a great deal more credit than she does, and typical of the kind of legendary accretion with which Miss Gerin found herself obliged to contend. Mrs Gaskell visited the parsonage only once in Charlotte's lifetime (at a moment, as Miss Gerin shows, of peculiar tension between daughter and father since he had just sent Charlotte's suitor packing). She took an instant dislike to Mr Bronte and punished him cruelly afterwards with her published account of how he tyrannised over his small children, burnt their red and yellow boots, forbade them meat, habitually vented his spleen by sawing up chair-backs and once by cutting his wife's silk frock to ribbons. Miss Gerin has amply demonstrated that there is not a word of truth in any of these stories; and yet, coming after Mrs Gaskell's brilliant opening evocation of Haworth and the grim gallows' humour of its inhabitants, even now they make an indelible impression on anyone who reads the first edition.
The fact is that Mrs Gaskell wrote (as Thackeray said Miss Bronte did) in a passion with her characters: she loved Charlotte, and anyone who had wronged her friend, or simply failed to do her credit, must face the consequences. She was here, as in nearly all her novels, an energetic moralist : hence her bitter denunciation of Branwell's temptress, her appeals to the Public for justice, her instant decision, on learning of Charlotte's love for M. Heger in Brussels, to suppress it.
If Mrs Gaskell's Life is hasty, intemperate, high-handed, then Miss Gerin's is slow, dispassionate, methodical. The contrast is plain in their treatment of Charlotte's death. Mrs Gaskell, who believed implicitly in discretion, at least when it touched her heroine's privacy, is sober and terse, her writing infused at once with an imaginative grandeur and a desolating sense of her own pain and pity. Miss Gerin (who here permits herself to draw for the first time directly on her own intimate knowledge of Haworth in a fine passage on the equinoctial gales of 1855) gives minute information about the weather, the servants, the doctors' diagnoses, even the bedroom furniture: 'Charlotte lay now in the mahogany four-poster bed that had been her parents', then her aunt's, then her own shared with Anne, and, since her marriage, once again the 'state' bed in the sense it had when her parents were young and the whole family future yet to make'. This passage acquires its force not so much from any intrinsic importance, still less beauty, but from its recapitulation of the dead inmates of the parsonage, and from its reaching back over thirty-five years to the folding camp-beds on which (as we learnt three volumes back, at the beginning of Miss Gerin's Anne Brontë) Charlotte had once slept with three of her sisters in the room, measuring 9ft. by 5ft. Thin., where all her books and theirs were written.
It is this patient, orderly, illuminating accumulation of detail which is Miss Gerin's forte; and, though her life of Mrs Gaskell is ' scrupulously full, its detail scarcely manages to take on in a single, slim volume the weight and gravity adhering—at any rate in Charlotte Bronte—to even the most trivial doings of the Brontës. Mrs Gaskell was, as Carlyle noted from her first book, 'a beautiful, cheerfully pious, social, clear and observant character'. Best-seller, model mother, devoted wife and daughter of unitarian ministers, she lived a life of domestic tranquillity and charitable usefulness, managing miraculously to reconcile the demands of her writing (which was in any case largely an extension of her active social conscience) with the smooth running of household and parish. She was entertaining, industrious, hospitable, and kind. But it was her happiness which delighted Charlotte Brontë, who had almost no other first-hand knowledge of this kind of thing. Miss Gerin is not disposed to dispute Charlotte's comparison of Mrs Gaskell's goodness with 'the nourishing efficacy of our daily bread. It is not bitter; it is not lusciously sweet : it pleases, without flattering the palate; it sustains, without forcing the strength'.
It is also a trifle tame, which may explain why Miss Gerin tends to treat it, so to speak, at arm's length. Occasional nervous headaches or fainting fits, shortage of cash, even the tragic death of an infant son, scarcely supply the pattern of hammer blows which shaped the Bronte biographies. Mrs Gaskell lost her mother when she was barely one, but (evading the attentions of a snobbish stepmother whose disobliging features she eventually transposed without rancour into the masterly portrait of Mrs Gibson in Wives and Daughters) she spent an idyllic childhood with her Aunt Lumb in Knutsford, the Cranford to which she later paid enchanting tribute. She invented, with immense success, the plan of writing front experience and with crusading purpose about industrial conditions in the north (and was promptly copied by Dickens in Hard Times).
Her life, in short, leaves no wrongs to right (unless one counts the rumour, ablY disproved by Miss Gerin, that she was not entirely happy with Mr Gaskell). Indignation is the trait which links Mrs Gaskell as a biographer to Miss Gerin, and drew both to Charlotte Bronte: the former waS determined to refute the accusations levelled at her friend of 'coarseness', unnatural knowledge of vice, unladylike interest In passion; the latter seems, by her own account, to have been similarly stirred to clear away the damage done over a centurY and more by countless romantic Bronte mythographers toiling in Mrs Gaskell's shadow. But there is, perhaps inevitablY, nothing very stirring about Elizabeth Gaskell. It is, like its subject at her most tiresome, worthy, dutiful and dull; indeed, given the qualities of the parties involved, it is scarcely surprising that the chief merit of this last transaction between the two should be to provide a fascinating footnote to their joint labours on behalf of Charlotte Bronte.
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