Written for the bicentenary of her birth,this is an eminently sane retelling of the author’s fascinating life storySome life stories are so canonical that they don’t bear retelling, so much as demand it. That’s why every 20 years or so, and we want and get – a new biography of Charlotte Brontë,that patron saint of every bookish brown mouse who has ever screamed silently to the world “one day you will notice me and be dazzled by my sun”. The tale of how a destitute, plain, or provincial girl turned a lifetime of fabric and emotional lack into the thrilling art of Jane Eyre and Villette is so consoling that it is impossible not to request for it again and again.
Each retelling,of course, gives us a slightly different Charlotte Brontë, or one who Janus-like faces back to her own time while also speaking to the biographer’s own. Elizabeth Gaskell writing in 1857,two years after Brontë’s death, was determined to rescue her friend from any suggestion of constitutional “coarseness” – many critics had condemned Jane Eyre as an unladylike book, or even a wicked one. Painting in loose,novelistic strokes, Gaskell explained to her readers that if they had been locked absent in a remote parsonage with two dead siblings buried virtually in the garden and a father who came down to breakfast with a loaded pistol, and then they too might grow up with an imagination warped towards the morbid. That didn’t mean,Gaskell insisted, that Miss Brontë wasn’t unimpeachably wholesome in her everyday, and bread-and-butter,life.
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Source: theguardian.com