Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle | Page 8

her place and remained about two years. Emily was a teacher for one six months in a ladies' school in Halifax or the neighbourhood. I do not know whether it was conduct or want of finances that prevented Branwell from going to the Royal Academy. Probably there were impediments of both kinds.
'I am afraid if you give me my name I shall feel a prominence in the book that I altogether shrink from. My very last wish would be to appear in the book more than is absolutely necessary. If it were possible, I would choose not to be known at all. It is my friend only that I care to see and recognise, though your framing and setting of the picture will very greatly enhance its value.--I am, my dear Mrs. Gaskell, yours very sincerely,
'ELLEN NUSSEY.'
The book was published in two volumes, under the title of The Life of Charlotte Bronte, in the spring of 1857. At first all was well. Mr. Bronte's earliest acknowledgment of the book was one of approbation. Sir James Shuttleworth expressed the hope that Mr. Nicholls would 'rejoice that his wife would be known as a Christian heroine who could bear her cross with the firmness of a martyr saint.' Canon Kingsley wrote a charming letter to Mrs. Gaskell, published in his Life, and more than once reprinted since.
'Let me renew our long interrupted acquaintance,' he writes from St. Leonards, under date May 14th, 1857, 'by complimenting you on poor Miss Bronte's Life. You have had a delicate and a great work to do, and you have done it admirably. Be sure that the book will do good. It will shame literary people into some stronger belief that a simple, virtuous, practical home life is consistent with high imaginative genius; and it will shame, too, the prudery of a not over cleanly though carefully white-washed age, into believing that purity is now (as in all ages till now) quite compatible with the knowledge of evil. I confess that the book has made me ashamed of myself. Jane Eyre I hardly looked into, very seldom reading a work of fiction--yours, indeed, and Thackeray's, are the only ones I care to open. Shirley disgusted me at the opening, and I gave up the writer and her books with a notion that she was a person who liked coarseness. How I misjudged her! and how thankful I am that I never put a word of my misconceptions into print, or recorded my misjudgments of one who is a whole heaven above me.
'Well have you done your work, and given us the picture of a valiant woman made perfect by suffering. I shall now read carefully and lovingly every word she has written, especially those poems, which ought not to have fallen dead as they did, and which seem to be (from a review in the current Fraser) of remarkable strength and purity.'
It was a short-lived triumph, however, and Mrs. Gaskell soon found herself, as she expressed it, 'in a veritable hornet's nest.' Mr. Bronte, to begin with, did not care for the references to himself and the suggestion that he had treated his wife unkindly. Mrs. Gaskell had associated him with numerous eccentricities and ebullitions of temper, which during his later years he always asserted, and undoubtedly with perfect truth, were, at the best, the fabrications of a dismissed servant. Mr. Nicholls had also his grievance. There was just a suspicion implied that he had not been quite the most sympathetic of husbands. The suspicion was absolutely ill-founded, and arose from Mr. Nicholls's intense shyness. But neither Mr. Bronte nor Mr. Nicholls gave Mrs. Gaskell much trouble. They, at any rate, were silent. Trouble, however, came from many quarters. Yorkshire people resented the air of patronage with which, as it seemed to them, a good Lancashire lady had taken their county in hand. They were not quite the backward savages, they retorted, which some of Mrs. Gaskell's descriptions in the beginning of her book would seem to suggest. Between Lancashire and Yorkshire there is always a suspicion of jealousy. It was intensified for the moment by these sombre pictures of 'this lawless, yet not unkindly population.' {17} A son-in-law of Mr. Redhead wrote to deny the account of that clergyman's association with Haworth. 'He gives another as true, in which I don't see any great difference.' Miss Martineau wrote sheet after sheet explanatory of her relations with Charlotte Bronte. 'Two separate householders in London each declares that the first interview between Miss Bronte and Miss Martineau took place at her house.' In one passage Mrs. Gaskell had spoken of wasteful young servants, and the young servants in question came upon Mr. Bronte for the following testimonial:--
'HAWORTH, August 17th, 1857.
'I beg leave to state to all whom it