Please join us for a Q&A with Graham Watson, author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë
We’d like to welcome Graham Watson to the BookBrowse Community Forum. Graham is the author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life, which longtime BookBrowse contributor Peggy Kurkowski reviewed for our August 13 issue (you can take a look here).
Graham is a specialist in the Brontës and Elizabeth Gaskell, and he is currently researching Victorian literary identities at the University of Glasgow. He has published a number of papers in Brontë Studies and has recently joined the journal’s peer-review board. The Invention of Charlotte Brontë is his first book. He joins us from Glasgow.
Please use this space to ask Graham questions about his work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Graham - Thanks so much for joining us! Please tell the group a little about yourself and your research.
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Thank you Kim, for the opportunity to join you all here in this friendly community! And many thanks to those readers who’ve already read my new book The Invention of Charlotte Brontë. It’s a great pleasure to hear from you all. I’m excited to take your questions about the book, about the Brontës as a whole - ask me anything! - or about historical research and writing more generally.
As Kim says, I’m Scottish and living in Scotland’s largest city - Glasgow. It’ll be no surprise if I tell you my passions include history and literature. I studied English language and linguistics at one of the UK’s 4 ancient universities - Glasgow, founded in 1451 - and have many magical memories of that time receiving lectures in its turrets and towers. Professionally I’ve been a copywriter, an editor and an art director, and my life long love of the Brontës and their work has resulted in a book that appears to be moving and shocking many readers!
Ask away!
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Wonderful to have you here, Graham!
You mention having a lifelong love of the Brontës and their work. Do you remember how you first encountered the sisters? And do you have a favorite among them, as individuals and as writers?
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The second half of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë is about Elizabeth Gaskell’s challenges in writing Charlotte’s biography. At what point did you “meet” Gaskell? Did you develop a similar love of her work?
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I was introduced to the Brontës by my late mother who was a voracious reader and gifted me with the same passion. Like many women of her generation, she’d read the famous Brontë novels and passed them on to me. Once I’d read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I found a pictorial biography of their lives. It all seemed so strange and sad, and so elemental. I knew I had to find out more and started reading more about them. And it hasn’t stopped!
How did this passion turn into a career?
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I came to Elizabeth Gaskell a little later, being introduced to her as a character within the Brontë story as it was told in various books about them. She was friends with the eldest surviving Brontë sibling - Charlotte - and produced the very first biography of her within two years of Charlotte’s death. Little did I know then that this would become the subject of my book!
But yes, I came to love Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction too. She’s a marvellous writer - warm, witty, compassionate but judicious - and I’m jealous of anyone who is still to discover her. Her novel Cranford is a perfect starting point for anyone interested.
After reading many books about the Brontës over a long period of time - their lives are one of those never-ending subjects generating vast shelves of biography, criticism, speculation etc - I realised there was part of the story no-one examined much: how their lives moved from the reality of the everyday into a narrative that can be retold by writers and historians. While most biographies of the family end with the death of Charlotte - or the death of her elderly father 6 years after her - I knew there was more to say and wanted to know what happened ‘behind’ the story, as it were.
For my own interest, I began researching how Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857. That’s a book that still divides readers and critics, being seen as both a valuable source while being disputed as unreliable hagiography. I knew there must be a story behind that kind of discrepancy. And I was right!
What makes The Invention of Charlotte Brontë so unique, for those who haven’t read it, is that the second half of the book is about Gaskell’s creation of Bronte’s autobiography. I’m curious about the thought process that went into it before you put pen to paper - had a biography been rolling around in your mind for a while, or did you suddenly think Gaskell’s story needed to be told, or…? Which of the two did you begin with?
Edit: Never mind, I see you mostly answered that above. 
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How did you go about researching the book? Did you uncover anything surprising in your research?
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That’s such an interesting question! My book is the first joint biography of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, and the first to examine in depth Gaskell’s research into Brontë’s life, and the media scandal her biography triggered in Britain and American when it was published. Those who’d known Brontë battled to control how history would remember her, lawsuits were threated, and Gaskell was forced to make a false confession of errors to save her publisher from being sued. Her Life of Charlotte was banned and rewritten twice in six months. The outcome created the romantic myth of the Brontës.
Originally, I thought of this as Elizabeth Gaskell’s story. But very quickly I knew it would be impossible to contextualise without seeing her close friendship with Charlotte Brontë - and understanding how Charlotte presented her life to Gaskell as a series of stories.
Yes, I found much that surprised me, even as familiar as I was with the history of the Brontës. I decided the most objective way - the way that would produce the clearest view of the past - was to rely solely on first hand sources. That meant looking through archives at manuscripts and papers, examining personal mementos and visiting locations related to my book, reading memoirs and recollections of all those who’d even a glancing contact with Brontë and Gaskell. As well as that I read all the daily newspapers of the time from their area of England to get a framework of details like the current weather and what interested the general public.
Going back to the written record in any subject reveals history as messy - and more fascinating for that. I found that many relationships we thought we had understood in the lives of Brontë and Gaskell were clearly more complex than we thought. For example, it’s always been assumed Charlotte’s publisher George Smith - a young dynamic figure in literary London - was a Prince Charming figure who may have been romantically involved with Charlotte. The evidence, I soon saw, pointed in a different direction: that he saw Charlotte Brontë only as a profitable commodity he could use to lure more more business and whom he could disparage in private.
I really felt for Elizabeth. I can’t imagine the challenge, especially when those closest to Charlotte were so uncooperative. As a researcher yourself, it had to have made you groan aloud when you learned her husband destroyed her letters. It’s kind of amazing Elizabeth was able to put the biography together at all, given the obstacles. Why do you think she felt so compelled to continue?
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Thank you, I’m so glad to hear you felt for Elizabeth Gaskell! It’s worth noting how she has been villainised for her involvement in the Brontës, being characterised as an unreliable meddler by biographers ever since. I point out that those who thought this way took their cue from the scurrilous reporting of the scandal Gaskell created, without knowing the full story.
It was horrifying to learn that over a ten year period Charlotte’s widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and her father, Patrick Brontë systematically destroyed the letters she’d sent to them while denying to Gaskell they had any of Charlotte’s letters. We have found some of these fragments, which were given out as souvenirs to Brontë fans. All of them are signed and dated by either Arthur or Patrick and most of them are too small to reconstruct to read. As no copies were made before they destroyed them, we have no idea of their content. An incalculable loss to history!
The conventional wisdom that Gaskell wanted to turn Brontë into a saintly figure for a Victorian audience isn’t true: a mainly English Protestant reading audience wasn’t particularly invested in saintly figures, but they were interested in social injustices. And the more questions Gaskell asked of Brontë’s friends and family, the angrier she became that someone of her talents could be treated so badly by so many. Despite the obstacles - or perhaps in order to defy them - Gaskell became determined to publicly shame those who’d abused Brontë and saw the act of writing her life as revenge she could carry out on Charlotte’s behalf.
Why do you suppose Elizabeth & Charlotte became so close in spite of their differences? (Elizabeth writes “She and I quarrelled and differed about almost everything”)? Charlotte seemed quite willing to cut other women out of her life when they offended her but not Elizabeth. Any theories about why that was?
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Yes, that’s right. I show how Charlotte cut off her friendship with fellow writer Harriet Martineau when she published a disparaging review of Charlotte’s last novel, and fell out with her best friend Ellen Nussey for 9 months when they argued about Charlotte’s choice of husband (her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls). What made her friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell different was the emotional distance between them and their level of candour and mutual respect. Charlotte knew Elizabeth’s respect and friendship was based on Charlotte’s professional standing as an author and had no hidden agenda. More than anyone else, Gaskell seems to have ‘got’ Charlotte in a way that others hadn’t - and Charlotte valued this.
Speaking of Ellen Nussey how much of a role do you think she played in the biography’s creation? Do you think it would have been written without her pushing Elizabeth some during the process?
She was crucial. She was essential in Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, from concept to execution - but she had a very ambivalent relationship with it in the decades after it was published.
For those who don’t know about her, Ellen Nussey was Charlotte Brontë’s closest friend. They met at a boarding school when they were about 13 years old, became confidantes and were friends for the rest of Charlotte’s life, with Ellen surviving her to the end of the 19th century. It was she who suggested Elizabeth Gaskell write Charlotte’s life after Charlotte died and became the main source of Gaskell’s information through loaning her several hundred of Charlotte’s private letters.
Once Ellen had prompted Gaskell and set her on course, Gaskell was pretty much self-directing, so I think she could have completed it anyway. Both women had the same anger about the conditions of Charlotte’s life and wanted to avenge her publicly. Significantly, Ellen had an adversarial relationship with Charlotte’s widower and her father, something which prevented their perspectives dominating. Crucially Ellen did not want to be named in Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, resulting in many complications for her which resulted in her essentially being shut out of the emerging myth of the Brontës.
She’s a fascinating character. Biographers have often characterised her in hand-maiden terms; subservient, obedient, docile. But her unpublished letters - which I quote in my book - show she was a woman of considerable strength and independence, full of righteous fury. In the years after all the Brontës were dead she came to see them as titans and lost her objectivity but nevertheless no book about the Brontës - including my own - could have been written without her.