Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell

This unusual new book by the leading Brontë scholar examines key issues in literary and biographical history, as a specific and a general question with wide ramifications. It examines a great deal of explicit and implicit evidence about Charlotte Brontë's own management of the story of the family - what has become known as 'The Brontë Myth'. It carefully explores the story of the Brontës as transmitted by Elizabeth Gaskell, who was empowered to tell the story after Charlotte's death. Edward Chitham shows how Charlotte slanted the story, and her strategy in doing so. The work provides a major new focus for Charlotte's life and work. It searches out motivations and attitudes, carefully considering the personalities and intentions of these writers of fiction and of fact.