The scandal that engulfed the last Brontë sister's death

Two weeks before the unseasonably cold Easter of 1855, an entry was inscribed in the death register of a hilltop parish church in a small English village: “Charlotte Nicolls,” female, whose “Rank or Profession” was described as “Wife,” had died aged 38. She was buried without delay in her family’s vault under the church floor. Within 48 hours, newspaper vendors had an exclusive about her. Headlines screamed in inch-high letters: “Currer Bell is Dead.” Bell was Mrs. Nicholls’ pen name. We know her by her maiden name, Charlotte Brontë.

In the aftermath of her unexpected death, seemingly from acute morning sickness, public speculation erupted. Journalists unearthed literary gossip that had kept as a tabloid mainstay for the last decade, asking and answering the question their public wanted to know: who was the real Charlotte Brontë?

The three now-classic novels that established her as one of the most innovative authors of her generation had also made her one of the most notorious. The passion, violence, and social transgression of Jane Eyre (1847) were shocking enough to prickle many conservative reviewers of the time to guess it was the true confession of a debauched life. Many had questions. What kind of woman was the author? A poor servant, orphaned to scramble her way through the beds of rich, married men? Maybe she was the adulterous lover that fellow-novelist William Thackeray had allegedly locked away his wife to be with? Or perhaps “Currer Bell” was a hoax being played on the literary world? Speculation ran wild.

Who was Charlotte Brontë?

For those who had known Charlotte Brontë personally, all of this was hard to bear. While Brontë’s elderly father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë and her widower Arthur Nicholls, lived quietly and ignored the press, one of her life-long friends, a woman named Ellen Nussey, demanded they publicly contradict the rumors. In doing so, she triggered what would become one of the 19^th century’s biggest literary scandals.

Within eight weeks of Brontë’s funeral, Nussey had proposed someone she felt was an ideally positioned candidate to write a long-form defense: another of Charlotte’s friends and confidantes, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Born in London, she was the successful author of state-of-the-nation novels like Mary Barton (1848), Ruth (1853) and North and South (1855), that explored class-conflict and labor relations in an England divided by the impacts of the industrial revolution. She had known Charlotte Brontë over the last six years of Brontë’s life, befriending her when public interest was at its peak, and with only six years difference in age, they had much in common. Both had grown up in Christian households marred by early bereavements, both ultimately married clerics, and both were managing literary fame while concealing their true identities from the public.

While Gaskell had married young, produced children, and cultivated a wide network of influential friends at home in Manchester, one of England’s great industrial and creative centers, bereavement had left Brontë socially and emotionally isolated. The last survivor of six talented children, she cared for her father in a working-class Yorkshire mill town and had compressed her great literary achievements into the space of three years. With her sisters, Emily and Anne, she had published a joint collection of poems before the novels that made them all immortal; Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, before tuberculosis killed both Emily and Anne just six months apart.

(Meet the original members of the tortured poets department.)

Charlotte Brontë's warped legacy

In the years that followed her sisters’ deaths, Gaskell’s and Brontë’s friendship deepened. They wrote to each other frequently, merged their social circles, visited each others’ homes and talked in person at considerable length. Brontë’s recollections of her precocious siblings, their writing and creativity at home, their brilliance and their tragedies, captivated her. Unknown to Brontë, Gaskell was taking notes and sharing Brontë’s confidential letters with friends hungry for glimpses behind her public persona.

Reflecting on all this a month after Brontë’s death, Gaskell floated the idea of writing about her to Brontë’s own publisher, “I will publish what I know of her,” she told him, “and make the world honor the woman as much as they had admired the writer.” A week later, she compiled two letters she had sent to friends about Brontë’s personal life and published it as an anonymous essay in Sharpe’s Monthly, one of England’s most popular magazines. Without knowing Gaskell was behind it, Nussey saw it as yet another instance of press intrusion and appealed to Brontë’s father and her widower to put a stop to it, ironically suggesting Gaskell write the reply on their behalf.

Although enthusiastic, Brontë’s father set limits, telling Gaskell a formal pen-portrait of Charlotte’s life should be framed within an appraisal of her fiction. But Gaskell felt Brontë deserved more. Interviewing him and Nicholls in person, she sensed both were suppressing information and trying to manage her. They contradicted themselves and each other, swore they had no letters from Charlotte and insisted there was little to say anyway. As they presented it, Charlotte’s life was an uneventful preparation to be a governess and then a wife. Neither had any idea how much Gaskell already knew about them—and Charlotte’s life—from her conversations and letters. Later, it would emerge that Gaskell’s hunches about both men were correct and at that moment they were destroying their letters from Charlotte to send out fragments to fans as mementos.

The men directed her to Ellen Nussey and brought Gaskell to a turning point. Nussey confirmed what she suspected, that they were protecting their own reputations as clerics by concealing their involvement in the deprivations and hardships of Charlotte’s life. Determined to investigate, and deciding the proposed article should now be a full-scale biography, Gaskell interviewed everyone who had known Charlotte, tracing schoolfriends, servants, neighbors, shopkeepers, even strangers she had met only once at London parties. Gaskell collected as many of Charlotte’s personal letters as her friends would allow her to see and, disregarding their concerns about exposing Brontë’s private thoughts, copied everything from the confessional to the business-like considerations of publishing contracts. She investigated all the locations Brontë had visited across Britain and even left England for Belgium solely to interview in person a married man Brontë had secretly loved in her twenties when she attended his finishing school.

But the impressions she gathered were contradictory. Some of her interviewees remembered Brontë as chronically shy and prone to withdrawing in the presence of strangers, others saw her as a tragic figure, destroyed by grief, more described her as alarmingly blunt, candid and tenacious. It was clear that presenting the truth about Charlotte Brontë would require the balancing of many contrasts.

Convinced Brontë had been failed by many around her, Gaskell resolved to condemn all those that she felt had mistreated and exploited her. She wanted to publicly identify the abusive teachers running an unsanitary school where Charlotte’s two elder sisters caught the tuberculosis that killed them as children. She castigated Brontë’s employers, named crooked publishers who had tried to defraud her younger sisters Emily and Anne, and blamed the collapse of their brother’s health on his affair with a local landowner’s sexually predatory wife. More problematically, she exposed Brontë’s austere and outwardly respectable curate father as a manipulative and self-serving narcissist in private. Gaskell warned her publisher to have their lawyers on standby.

When The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in March 1857, almost two years to the day after Brontë’s death, it was an immediate bestseller. The public, primed by the mystery of Currer Bell, devoured it. But the backlash from those Gaskell criticized was swift and intense. All disputed her version of events, complaining about it to the press and threatening to sue Gaskell and her publisher for slander.

(Even after two centuries, nobody how Jane Austen died.)

While Gaskell insisted her information came from varied and verifiable sources who corroborated each other, she understood legal scrutiny could dismiss much of it as hearsay. Her publisher knew any trial would oblige them to summon her witnesses, many such as servants or other vulnerable women who were socially and economically disadvantaged, and ran the risk of exposing more about the complainants than Gaskell had done already.

Ruling out going to trial left Gaskell and her publisher with an unfortunate choice. Either offer them costly settlements or defuse the scandal by having Gaskell release a publicly humiliating, and false, confession of error with a promise to remove all her allegations from future editions of the book. She told her publisher she would do it as long as they understood everything she was being asked to cut came from eyewitnesses to Charlotte’s life or from Charlotte herself. “However,” she told them three months into the furor, “I submit.”

Accepting she was at an impasse, Gaskell’s solicitors issued a statement falsely admitting she had been misinformed and that she was wrong to criticize the objectors. The legal threats were dropped and over the next six months she steered The Life of Charlotte Brontë through another two editions that cut all the offensive material she maintained was true.

She had fallen on her sword. But it had lasting effects for her reputation. In accepting her public apology as definitive, the press framed Gaskell as a scold triumphantly castigated by the elites of aristocracy, education, and the clergy. Ever since, historians have treated the matter as an open and shut case, repeating the 19^th century press characterization of Gaskell as a fantasist and a gossip misled by other unreliable women. However, an examination of the manuscript evidence of letters from all those involved, demonstrates that this is not only incorrect but unjust.

In her letters Gaskell tells friends she intended The Life of Charlotte Brontë to be an expose of oppressive social powers in education, in society and within family structures. Once we understand the lasting criticisms are not the product of generations of academic consideration, but an unexamined repetition of defensive retaliations, a different picture emerges of Gaskell as a feminist whistleblower silenced by the forces she tried to expose. One of Gaskell’s witnesses, another life-long friend of Brontë, expressed her regret at Gaskell’s defeat, ‘I am sorry for it. Libelous or not, the first edition was all true.’

The time has come to revisit the evidence and set the record straight, for Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, in tribute to the spirit of those truth-tellers who ought to be heard long after their detractors have worked to silence them.