I despise Charlotte Brontë’s publisher and biographer
This post is about the fact that these two people, who both had the privilege of knowing one of the greatest female authors in history, seemed so preoccupied with her appearance.
In The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Elizabeth Gaskell wrote that Charlotte had said to her sisters that they were “morally wrong” to make their heroines beautiful automatically. Her reply included these words:
“I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.”
While it does sound like something Charlotte would say, I have no reason to trust Gaskell’s account. I dislike her intensely for the way she treated Charlotte, despite supposedly being her friend.
Here’s how Elizabeth Gaskell described Charlotte in her letter to Catherine Winkworth on 25 August 1850:
“a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad, and rather overhanging.”
It also seems to me that Elizabeth Gaskell wanted to erase the real Charlotte and turn her into a sickly saint.
Charlotte’s complaint about Gaskell is commonly quoted as follows:
“She seems determined that I shall be a sort of invalid. Why may I not be well like other people?”
Elizabeth also omitted Charlotte’s passionate love letters to Constantin Heger from her biography. I don’t believe she did it in good faith. I think she was intensely jealous of Charlotte’s genius and wanted to create a saintly image of her because she couldn’t accept that a woman with perfectly human passions and desires could be a genius. After all, if that were true, why wasn’t she, Elizabeth, a genius herself?!
Charlotte’s publisher, George Smith, was no better than Elizabeth Gaskell. In his late memoir of Charlotte, he described her as unusually small, old-fashioned in appearance, with a head disproportionately large for her body. He admired her eyes but criticized her mouth and complexion. One particularly harsh sentence was:
“There was but little feminine charm about her.”
He went on to portray her as painfully conscious of her appearance and intensely anxious to be pretty. He even wrote the following:
“But I believe that she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful.”
Of course, both Gaskell and Smith described the unusual beauty of Charlotte’s eyes. While I’m glad to know what Charlotte’s eyes looked like, I can’t shake the feeling that Gaskell and Smith needed to find at least one striking feature to reconcile her appearance with her ability to write a brilliant love story.
A perfectly ordinary-looking woman being a literary genius? Unacceptable!