In writing about Charlotte Brontë, whom she greatly admired, but whose novels she did not entirely like, Elizabeth Gaskell portrays the struggle of a woman artist for whom she had, until her late marriage, "foreseen the single life".
The resulting work--the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist--almost single-handedly created the Brontë myth. As Elisabeth Jay discusses in her introduction to this new edition, the Life weaves facts, dates, characters and anecdotes with considerable art, Gaskell's "Charlotte was an imaginative creation and, as such, took on a life of it's own". The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in an appendix.
