Biography as Both Fiction and Nonfiction
An engraving of George Richmond's portrait of Charlotte Brontë for the first edition of The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1857, was the first of many biographies of Charlotte Brontë and is widely considered the most comprehensive account of the Brontë family to date. Gaskell’s friendship with Charlotte, as well as her access to Charlotte’s extensive correspondence (including letters to lifelong friend Ellen Nussey and former professor Constantin Héger), gave her unparalleled insight into the more intimate details of the Brontës’ lives, thus enabling her to produce a work of such outstanding literary merit that it is often regarded as a sort of “last Brontë novel.”
The comparison of Gaskell’s work to a novel has implications beyond simply indicating that her work is both informational and compelling. Gabriele Helms speaks to the novelistic nature of biography in defining the genre as “a hybrid form that searches for a possible, plausible, but necessarily fictive, version of a life experience” (343). The operative word is “version,” as the biographer reconstructs the life of the subject not directly from the details of the subject’s life, but from his or her own interpretation of those details. Thus, Gaskell and other biographers are necessarily producing works that represent the versions of their subjects that reflect their own particular visions. In a way, the subjects become characters and the biographies themselves take on the qualities of a fictional narrative.
Helms is particularly critical of the “biographer-persona,” which, in the case of Gaskell, she believes “explicitly draws attention to [Gaskell’s] own telling of Brontë’s life” as well as “the act of narration itself” (348). That is, in addition to the influence that Gaskell’s biased vision has on her interpretive work, the narration in itself becomes an avenue of self-promotion whereby she can demonstrate her authorial prowess in the guise of a biography. Helms seems to suggest that both the novelistic nature of biography and the self-indulgence of the “biographer-persona” are inherent in biographical writing, and are perhaps out of the biographer’s control altogether.
Four of the many letters written by Charlotte Brontë to Constantin Héger.
In addition to the many genre-specific elements exhibited in Gaskell's work, it is just as important to consider what is not exhibited. Brontë scholars have often noted that Gaskell deliberately excluded the more controversial details of Charlotte’s life from her account, the most notable of which being her infatuation with Constantin Héger, a married man and professor at the boarding school in Brussels where Charlotte and her sister Emily studied intermittently from 1842 to 1844. Although Gaskell does in fact allude to Charlotte’s close relationship with Héger, it wasn’t until the publication of four letters from Charlotte to Héger in The Times of London in 1913 that the full extent of Charlotte’s affection was revealed to the public.
Katherine Frank, like Helms, believes that “Gaskell was confined by her didactic vision of her subject,” thus presenting Charlotte “as a paragon of brave endurance, moral integrity and superhuman self-denial” while neglecting her less noble qualities (142-43). Frank accounts for the suppression of the details that would expose these less noble qualities by suggesting that Gaskell “tried to appease the conflicting demands of” Charlotte’s father, husband, and Héger himself, as well as the “Victorian reading public” whose “notions of propriety . . . would not allow even an unconscious attraction between a young single woman and her married school master” (143). It is possible that Gaskell simply wanted to avoid legal action, or that she did not want to risk the alienation of Charlotte’s readership.
Ultimately, it all comes down to whether or not the preservation of the subject’s honor is worth falsifying their character. The decision to perpetuate the mythical image of the Brontës at the expense of truthful representation may strike the modern reader as a sort of betrayal, but it is important to bear in mind that Gaskell had to contend with the demands of her day. The pressure to adhere to the Victorian standards of propriety was likely more than twenty-first century readers can fathom, and thus it is possible that Gaskell felt an enormous responsibility to preserve the propriety of her subject. Gaskell’s decision is essentially an artistic one, as are all of her authorial decisions; just like the portraits by Richmond and Branwell, the representation of Charlotte in The Life of Charlottë Brontë is deliberately and meticulously shaped by her own unique, and inherently biased, vision.
Art, in all of its forms, is subjective. It would be nonsensical to avoid looking at certain paintings or reading certain works of literature simply because the perspective of the artist is influenced by personal bias. In the end, the greatest and most effective art is always that which complicates, disrupts, and challenges our preconceived perceptions of both subject and artist, and, by extension, their relationship to one another. Perhaps the reason for the enduring obsession with Brontë biography is that there is never a shortage of writers who want to challenge, and readers who want to be challenged. As long as the world continues to care, artists will continue to create.