ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë was created through the fusion of interpreted and inflected letters into a biographer’s narrative. Chapter 3 considers how a letter collection was deployed to write a life with linking passages of greater length and discursiveness. Gaskell established biographical and autobiographical credentials through letters and created a narrative shape from available evidence. This approach incorporates the elements of trading and withholding, of self-narration and fictionalisation identified in Charlotte Barrett’s edition of Burney’s Diary and Letters. Gaskell’s Life introduced a narrative of recovery and duty, also explored by Barrett, and used Brontë’s own words within a new frame. Gaskell also took on the role of defender in answering reviewers through her narrative arcs and composition in letters. Further textual transmissions took place when Gaskell’s own letters were her evidence, reoriented in new contexts. This chapter assesses the ‘duty narrative’ of Brontë’s letters to her old schoolfriend Ellen Nussey and the positioning of Brontë’s own words in the Life. The chapter then looks at the shaping of the narrative and the transmission of Gaskell’s letters into the biographical text.
