BookBrowse Reviews The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson

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This absorbing and original study of Charlotte Brontë explores her later life, her legacy, and the troubled writing of her biography by acclaimed Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.

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In 1850, two of the Victorian era's greatest novelists met for the first time in England's tranquil Lake District. Elizabeth Gaskell, a burgeoning writer, and Charlotte Brontë, the woman behind the pseudonym Currer Bell, came face-to-face at a meeting arranged by mutual friends. Elizabeth found Charlotte "a curiosity; mercurial, paradoxical and barely socialized," yet one who "had somehow produced one of the boldest works of literature in recent times." Here before her was the creator of Jane Eyre, and, at age thirty-two, the sole surviving sibling of the Brontë clan. The friendship Charlotte and Elizabeth forged there would last for five years until Charlotte's premature death in 1855; but Elizabeth was a loyal friend even after Charlotte passed away, taking up her nib to pen the first biography of Charlotte's life—a life that Elizabeth considered "tragic to the point of being almost unbelievable." Brontë specialist Graham Watson's superb book, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, focuses on Charlotte's final years and Gaskell's biography of her, which was a daunting project hampered by the men in Charlotte's life who wanted to control access to key letters, manuscripts, and even her drawn portrait.

Watson first takes readers to Charlotte's lonely existence on the moors of Haworth, where she had lived with her family her whole life. By 1850, Charlotte lived there only with her difficult father, Patrick, and the staggering toll of personal loss she had endured was indeed almost beyond comprehension: Just as the three Brontë sisters were enjoying the publication of their individual novels (Charlotte's Jane Eyre in 1847; Emily's Wuthering Heights in 1847; and Anne's Agnes Gray in 1847 and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848), tuberculosis would strike down Emily, Anne, and their only brother, Branwell, within an eight-month period from 1848 to 1849. Then, in late 1850, Charlotte's "anonymous" life ended when she revealed the true identities of Currer Bell and her sisters' pseudonyms, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell, in a preface to new editions of her late sisters' novels. The revelation was reported in newspaper columns across the world, and Charlotte "stepped into 1851 a public figure and a celebrity."

Along with public exposure came a heightened interest among her friends and associates in learning about Charlotte's family life and her memories of her famous siblings. Charlotte's storytelling in response to this interest, Watson writes, was her "courtship with the outside world" and a way for her to draw people into her influence and keep them there; in sympathetic company, she would produce "set-piece anecdotes" of her "comfortless childhood" and how it created the isolated adulthood she experienced in remote Haworth. Watson draws on a wealth of primary sources to describe Charlotte's life, including letters that Charlotte wrote to and received from friends, like her childhood friend Ellen Nussey and other women writers such as Harriet Martineau and Gaskell. Watson is an unobtrusive mediator, letting the voices of the women speak through voluminous letter excerpts, and his text paints a rich, brooding portrait of a woman desperately lonely without her siblings, always stranded "on the losing side of love."

The second half of Watson's book explores Gaskell's decision, after her friend's death, to document Charlotte's "comfortless life" of sacrifice and duty to so many—father, brother, employers, and others who exploited her need for meaningful connection—with a "deserved compensation of glory denied to her in life," which would become the biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë. As the friendship between Charlotte and Gaskell had deepened over five years, so had their conversations, with Elizabeth asking Charlotte about her fiction "and its wellsprings in her past." Charlotte's responses, as well as other stories of her past that she shared in her elegantly written missives or over tea with friends, would make their way into Gaskell's book. But upon publication, the biography proved to be controversial; some people claimed it was libelous—including Patrick Brontë, who believed the descriptions of his angry outbursts and denial of meat to the Brontë children were "unfounded"—and Gaskell was required to revise the biography twice within six months to appease the detractors.

Harriet Martineau, with whom Charlotte had ended her friendship after learning that she wrote a scathing critique of Charlotte's 1853 novel Villette, found discrepancies within the biography, including within Charlotte's own letters that were quoted, which made Martineau wonder "if Charlotte had been a pathological liar." In particular, she took issue with the biography's stated reason for Branwell's death—at first Charlotte claimed it was due to his "vices" (he was an alcoholic and sometime-drug abuser), but then told Elizabeth he died because of a brokenhearted affair with a married woman. People blamed Gaskell for these objectionable inaccuracies, even though, as Martineau put it, they were not Elizabeth's "misunderstandings" but rather "Charlotte's own distortions." Martineau felt that "Charlotte had been disingenuous with everyone from her employers to her friends," Watson writes, "dramatizing her own life so that when Elizabeth repeated her anecdotes in The Life, the blame for inventing them fell on to her."

But Martineau eventually came around to Gaskell's view of Charlotte's life, which was that "she never stood a chance" against the men in her life who "harried and manipulated" her, including Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte's husband of nine months, who, upon Charlotte's death, wished to burn most of her remaining papers, letters, and an early unfinished novel, The Professor, which hinted at an early, unrequited love for an instructor in Charlotte's youth. Gaskell's collusion with the publisher to convince Arthur to save the manuscript is the reason it still exists today; she also employed other cunning tactics to outmaneuver Arthur and more barriers to her research, which Watson admiringly details. The Invention of Charlotte Brontë peels away more than a century of Brontë myth to reveal the complex woman at the heart of it, and the supreme act of friendship and fortitude it took to tell her story to the world.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in August 2025, and has been updated for the December 2025 edition. Click here to go to this issue.