To understand why Gaskell of normal girls with a rich imagination made a mysticism sufferer, who at midnight under the moon ate heather in half with poems, worshiped the tall figure of his father-tyrant and dragged the guilt for his brother - an alcoholic and harlot, it is necessary to understand certain conventionalities of Victorian society and what kind of person was Charlotte Bronte herself. Here I should probably send everyone to the wonderful work of Lukasta Miller, called The Vgopto Myth. In this book, Miller does not try to build some kind of biography of the Bronte sisters, but consistently - with proofs, documents, quotations, etc. - shows where the myth of the Bronte sisters came from, as of the Yorkshire wastelands' Suonnas. How they became crazy mystics in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth - nymphomaniacs, who merged into the literature suppressed sexual energy and - in the case of Emily - also an anorexic lesbian.
But back to the Victorian era. Let me remind you that the sisters published their works under men's aliases. And not because, as you would think, they would not be printed under the women's names. Just a man's nickname gave more freedom of action and was more commercially profitable. Are you a man? Super, write, please, though about ghosts who knock on the window and ask them to let in, though about erotic-electrical connection - anyway, mostly mental - teachers and students, but even though you're talking about sex writing (in the framework of the Lewis Monk, of course: "I found my chest, the lightning sparkled and Satan took possession of his soul"). Bronte's sisters could publish their strange, not Victorian-like emotional and splashing literary otherness works under men's pseudonyms - and no one would have said a word to them. Then there were good times, Victorian spiritual paperclips about gender were about this - a man - it's a domesticated animal, not cut his mane, so he pulls out because of the belt phallic symbol, flee to war and do not let God fight with anyone there. Another matter is a woman - started to write novels, so write them as Mrs. Gaskell, so that the virgins were gentle as doves, and blame some, for example, industrialism. Of course, many people didn't care about spiritual paper clips, for example, the writer George Eliot, although she was typed under a male alias, in other respects she didn't care about social stereotypes - she lived in sin with the publisher and spent her entire life trying to overcome the dull moralizer). But Charlotte Bronte was not like that. She was, I think, very unhappy at all. She wanted freedom, she wanted creativity, she wanted to be herself, Charlotte - and she wanted public approval. That's why she wanted male aliases. That's why she was editing Emily's poems. (When Emily died, Charlotte reissued her poems, rewriting them in the direction of dementia. In the preface, she presented Emily as an unhappy rebellious soul who loved to wander the wasteland in her spare time waiting for inspiration from a pigeon - or swan - to come upon her. In fact, Charlotte was afraid to death that someone would think that her sister, being in her right mind and firm memory, wrote such passionate - feminine - poems. She was ashamed of her sister, you know?
So when Charlotte came to London and met Mrs. Gaskell, she couldn't tell her - you know, Liz, we're all normal girls, just big fantasies. Charlotte wanted to be interesting. So she started feeding Gaskell with literature. She'll add her feelings there, pretend to be a victim, and hint that life is hard for them. Gaskell, of course, ate all this for her mother, for her father and aunt Augusta.
So when Charlotte died, Gaskell grabbed the opportunity to write her biography. The biography promised to be a novel. But when Gaskell came to Yorkshire, to the homeland of Bronte, she was horrified to find that the ends did not agree. The house wasn't on the heathlands but in the middle of a busy street. Bronte's father was not a gloomy asshole, but a quiet and colorless priest. Brother drank, sisters died - that's right, but at the same time, it turned out that the sisters and loved to have fun, and to visit, and not only suffered and cried but also led a rich life. I think that was the moment when Elizabeth Gaskell went a little grey. The real and unthinkable story of the Bronte sisters meant two things to her:
1) It does not hold on to the novel,
2) her girlfriend Charlotte's posthumous danger of what people would say if they knew she was normal when she wrote all this. Maybe she also wanted to have sex?
I think Charlotte Bronte would have liked the book. It made it interesting. She made her unhappy. She was unhappy, but it's one thing to suffer from her own stupidity - for example, to marry a short man and throw away his literature (we all remember why Charlotte never finished the "Emma Brown" - Nichols said it was nonsense and it would be better for her to leave it all), and another thing - to suffer qualitatively, Beautifully, lying under the moon on the delightfully English wastelands, elevating himself to the level of an ancient Greek poet, on whom the talent fell from above with a heavy burden, a disastrous divine gift, crushed him - a pathetic little man - to the ground, squeezed out his heart and filled his chest with suffering.
So if you want to read about the life of the Bronte sisters as if it were a Hollywood biopic, then Mrs. Gaskell's "biography" is at your service. If you want to know how it really happened, I recommend the work of Lukasta Miller.