Honoring the Woman As Writer: Elizabeth Gaskell's the Life of Charlotte Bronte‪.‬

For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost. --Virginia Woolf, "The Lives of the Obscure" (The Common Reader) In Writing a Woman's Life Carolyn Heilbrun cites Elizabeth Gaskell as "the most salient of female biographers." (1) an apparent exception to Heilbrun's rule that (female) "biographers have largely ignored women as subjects, and that critics of biography have written as though men were the only possible subjects." (2) Adducing as evidence the mere six essays by women biographers out of forty included in James Clifford's 1962 Biography as an Art, Heilbrun concludes that before "the advent of contemporary feminism" women biographers chose "comfortable subjects" who "posed no threatening questions" or whose "atypical lives provided no disturbing model for the destinies of other women." (3) Indeed, one may speculate that it is precisely because of The Life's "salience," its divergence from the formal and cognitive paradigms of nineteenth-century biography that David Amigoni has chosen to exclude it from Victorian Biography. (4)