![]() ![]() Within five years of this first meeting, however, Brontë was dead. “Such a life as Miss Brontë’s I have never heard of before,” she marvelled to one correspondent. Yet each was fascinated by the other.īrontë had soon invited Mrs Gaskell to Haworth, a rare honour, and Gaskell was also deeply impressed by her new friend. By contrast, Brontë (pseudonymously hiding behind “Currer Bell”) was a sickly, self-effacing, reclusive woman, appalled by children, who hardly ever ventured into literary London. Gaskell was beautiful, worldly and dizzyingly public: a mother of four familiar with Florence Nightingale, Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and even Dickens, with whom she did not get on (“If I were Mr G,” exclaimed Dickens, “oh heaven, how I would beat her”). They were, in many respects, polar opposites. The two novelists first met in the Lake District in the summer of 1850. ![]()
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