suitable for young ladies, the issue of labor had to be politely elided, the compensation nominal.
As much as she detested working at Margaret Wooler’s school, Brontë looked up to Wooler because she managed to contrive an independent life by running a school. “ ‘There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her way through life,’ ” Brontë told her (p. 232). When Williams asked Brontë’s advice about educating his daughters, Brontë urged him to “give their existence some object” in case they did not marry. “An education secured is an advantage gained—a priceless advantage. Come what may—it is a step towards independency—and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency,” she cautions:
Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career.... How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? in that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope sustains me still.... I wish every woman in England had also a hope and a motive. Alas! there are many old maids who have neither (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, July 3, 1849; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 227 ).
When Brontë speaks generally about the lot of single women, she names economic dependency as their “great curse,” but in atomizing her own condition, she places emphasis not on her material condition, but on her intellectual and psychological needs.
Gaskell, too, was sensitive to “the trials of many single women, who waken up some morning to the sudden feeling of the purposelessness (is there such a word) of their lives.” “I think I see everyday how women, deprived of their natural duties as wives & mothers, must look out for other duties if they wish to be at peace,” Gaskell explains to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Gaskell’s formulation of the problem, that women are appointed by natural order to perform specific duties, differs only marginally from Brontë’s more practical view that a career would be a superfluity for a married woman: “When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident—when her destiny isolates her—I suppose she must do what she can—live as she can” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).
Gaskell refines her position in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, an artist. “One thing is clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life,” Gaskell muses, coming to the conclusion that “assuredly a blending of the two is desirable. (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean), which you will say it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68). Gaskell’s awkward answer in the Life is to divide Brontë’s existence into “two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled” (p. 272). While Gaskell’s ambivalence about female duty certainly registers here, the fact that she labels the currents “parallel” suggests that she saw the division not as a subordination of one role to the other, but rather as an uneasy coexistence of the two. In addition, Gaskell’s careful delineation between Brontë’s public and private personae has the effect of preserving her professionalism. Thackeray
As much as she detested working at Margaret Wooler’s school, Brontë looked up to Wooler because she managed to contrive an independent life by running a school. “ ‘There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman, who makes her way through life,’ ” Brontë told her (p. 232). When Williams asked Brontë’s advice about educating his daughters, Brontë urged him to “give their existence some object” in case they did not marry. “An education secured is an advantage gained—a priceless advantage. Come what may—it is a step towards independency—and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency,” she cautions:
Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career.... How should I be with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? in that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope sustains me still.... I wish every woman in England had also a hope and a motive. Alas! there are many old maids who have neither (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, July 3, 1849; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 227 ).
When Brontë speaks generally about the lot of single women, she names economic dependency as their “great curse,” but in atomizing her own condition, she places emphasis not on her material condition, but on her intellectual and psychological needs.
Gaskell, too, was sensitive to “the trials of many single women, who waken up some morning to the sudden feeling of the purposelessness (is there such a word) of their lives.” “I think I see everyday how women, deprived of their natural duties as wives & mothers, must look out for other duties if they wish to be at peace,” Gaskell explains to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 72). Gaskell’s formulation of the problem, that women are appointed by natural order to perform specific duties, differs only marginally from Brontë’s more practical view that a career would be a superfluity for a married woman: “When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident—when her destiny isolates her—I suppose she must do what she can—live as she can” (Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, May 12, 1848; in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vol. 2, p. 66).
Gaskell refines her position in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, an artist. “One thing is clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life,” Gaskell muses, coming to the conclusion that “assuredly a blending of the two is desirable. (Home duties and the development of the Individual I mean), which you will say it takes no Solomon to tell you but the difficulty is where and when to make one set of duties subserve and give place to the other” (The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, letter 68). Gaskell’s awkward answer in the Life is to divide Brontë’s existence into “two parallel currents—her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled” (p. 272). While Gaskell’s ambivalence about female duty certainly registers here, the fact that she labels the currents “parallel” suggests that she saw the division not as a subordination of one role to the other, but rather as an uneasy coexistence of the two. In addition, Gaskell’s careful delineation between Brontë’s public and private personae has the effect of preserving her professionalism. Thackeray
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