Charlotte Bronte Biography

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote a biography of Charlotte Bronte published in 1857 named "The Life of Charlotte Bronte."

"Elizabeth Gaskell's astonishingly vivid biography of Charlotte Bronte is written with all the sweep, color and fullness of a great Victorian novelist, which is exactly what Gaskell was.  She was also a shrewd journalist.  Based on her own interviews with Charlotte Bronte and a cache of 400 letters from Charlotte's intimate childhood friend Ellen Nussey, the book opens up the strange family life of the (then) obscure Haworth Parsonage. We see the original of Charlotte's Jane Eyre magically emerging but also the haunting, enigmatic figure of Charlotte's sister Emily; the tender Anne Bronte; the opium wrecked brother Branwell; the deeply eccentric father, Rev. Patrick Bronte, who fired guns in his churchyard.  If you wish to get the flavor, just read the chapters that describe Charlotte's fraught relationship  with Emily and Emily's savage handling of her terrifying bull mastiff, Keeper. Charlotte's modern biographer, Claire Harman, says rightly that Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronte" first made biography "an imaginative creation," with the force of myth.