Multiple voices on the manuscript of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë

“I am in the Hornet’s nest with a vengeance” (Gaskell 1997b, 453) is how Elizabeth Gaskell described the reception of her 1857 biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (LCB). It is a fitting image to describe the indignation which met some of the memoir’s portraits of people associated with Charlotte Brontë during her life. The fact that Gaskell considered this reaction as “vengeance” indicates how, in the process of writing the memoir, she believed that her personal reputation was tied up and associated with Brontë’s to the point that she felt victimised by the controversy surrounding it. However distressing the memoir’s reception was for Gaskell, though, it was not unexpected. She used the “Hornet’s nest” image to explain how this social awareness influenced her sometimes inconsistent approach to writing the memoir in a letter after its publication: