Life Of Charlotte Brontë Volume 1

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, her father asked his daughter's closest friend to preserve her story. Elizabeth Gaskell, already a celebrated novelist, spent two years interviewing the family, friends, and servants who had known Charlotte, gathering letters and documents before they scattered. The result is this volume: an intimate portrait of a genius in the making, set against the wild Yorkshire moors and the cramped corners of Haworth Parsonage. Here is the childhood scarred by the deaths of Charlotte's two older sisters at Cowan Bridge school, a trauma that would become the basis for Lowood in Jane Eyre. Here is the fierce intellectual life of the Brontë children, inventing imaginary kingdoms while their father preached in the next room and their mother faded into illness. Here too is Charlotte's struggle to forge a writing career in a world that dismissed female authors, her years teaching and working as a governess, her rejection by publishers, her eventual triumph with Jane Eyre. Gaskell writes with warmth and honesty about a woman she admired, but she does not soften the harder truths: the family's tragedies, the pressures of poverty, the toll of genius. For anyone who has ever loved Jane Eyre, this biography reveals the extraordinary woman who created it.