The Life of Charlotte Bronte

Elizabeth Gaskell''s biography of her close friend Charlotte Bront-as published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim, and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the subtitle An Autobiography. It recounts Charlotte Bront-s life from her isolated childhood, through her years as a writer who had ''foreseen the single life'' for herself, to her marriage at thirty-eight and death less than a year later. The resulting work - the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist - explored the nature of Charlotte''s genius and almost single-handedly created the Bront-yth.