Mrs. Gaskell, in Cranford, may claim to have reached perfection by one finished achievement; which embodies the ideal to which we conceive that the work in fiction peculiar to women had been, more or less consciously, directed from the beginning. Probably the art would have been less flawless, if applied—as it was by sister-novelists—to a wider range of persons and subjects. Nothing of quite this kind has been again attempted, and it is not likely that such an attempt would succeed.
We should only notice, in passing, that Mrs. Gaskell left other admirable, and quite feminine, work on more ordinary lines. Wives and Daughters is a delightful love story; while North and South and Mary Barton are almost the first examples of that keen interest in social problems, and the life of the poor, in legitimate novels (not fiction-tracts), which we shall find so favourite a topic of women from her generation until to-day.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] She is writing, again, to Miss Clavering.
[11] When Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park had all been published.
[12] Fraser’s Magazine, Jan. 1838.
A LONELY SOUL
(Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1855)
The genius of Charlotte Brontë presents several characteristics which do not belong to the more or less orderly development of the earlier women’s work. In the first place she is primarily a romancist, depending far more on emotional analysis than on the exact portraiture of everyday life. Though her materials, like theirs, are gained entirely from personal experience, she clothes them with a passionate imagination very foreign to anything in Miss Burney or Jane Austen. She writes, in other words, because her emotions are forced into speech by that very intensity; not at all from amused observation of life. It would be difficult, indeed, to find outside her few remarkable stories so powerful an expression of passion as felt by women—who do not, as a rule, admit the power of such stormy emotions. Her work is further remarkable for being mainly inspired by memory; while the recognition of responsiveness in women leads her to paint mutual passion as it has been seldom revealed elsewhere.
Much has been written of late years concerning the life of Charlotte Brontë, and we have been told that the mystery is solved at last. For despite the almost startling frankness of Mrs. Gaskell’s famous Life; despite the intimate character of many of her published letters; it has always been recognised that the Charlotte Brontë of the biographers was not the Charlotte Brontë of Jane Eyre and Villette. Now that we have the letters to Monsieur Heger, however, it seems to be a prevailing conclusion that reconciliation, and understanding, are possible. If Charlotte Brontë, like her own Lucy Snowe, was in love with “her master”; if he was perfectly happy in his married life and, however responsive to enthusiastic admiration, found warmer feelings both embarrassing and vexatious; we have discovered the tragedy which fired her imagination, the utter loneliness which taught her to dwell so bitterly on the aching void of unreturned affection, to idealise so romantically the rapture of marriage. Personally we are disposed to accept these interpretations, but not to rely on them for everything. To begin with, it is always dangerous to dwell upon any “explanation” of genius; and, in the second place, it was not Charlotte Brontë’s experiences (which others have suffered), but the nature awakened by them, which determined their artistic expression.
Part of the difficulty arises from the two almost contradictory methods in which she “worked up” her stories. She had remarkable powers of observation and borrowed from real life as recklessly as Shakespeare borrowed plots, with very similar indifference to possible criticism. In this matter, indeed, she cannot be altogether acquitted of malice or spite; and we do not learn with unmixed pleasure how many “originals” actually existed for her dramatis personæ.