I first read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte when I was a teenager, newly enraptured by the Bronte sisters’ novels and the romantic bleakness of the Yorkshire moors. I remember the spell cast by the opening chapter as Gaskell takes us on her journey to visit Charlotte in Haworth. It is as though the reader is her companion on the Leeds and Bradford railway line to Keighley, then by carriage four miles to Haworth, past farms and workmen’s cottages and up the steep hill to the church, the parsonage, and the graveyard “terribly full of upright tombstones.” Gaskell, herself a novelist, paints an evocative picture of the landscape and atmosphere. We hear the horses’ hooves slipping on the paving stones of the steep street and breathe the “dim and lightless” air full of smoke from the clustered chimneys. I hadn’t read many biographies before and had expected it to start with Charlotte’s birth. I was so impressed with this way of leading the reader first into the world of the subject that my young self decided all biographies should be like this, that Elizabeth Gaskell had set the standard by which all others should be judged. It was one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life.

On publication in 1857, two years after Charlotte’s death, the Life was an immediate bestseller and has remained in print ever since, considered a classic of biography. What I did not know until recently, when I read a new book on the subject, is that on first publication Gaskell’s Life faced a storm of controversy causing major problems for the author and publisher.