Life of Charlotte Brontė

Women ought to be good biographers. They have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance. Mrs Gaskell, we regret to say, has, in the present work, so employed her talent that she appears too much in the latter light—as a gossip and a gad-about. There was not much to say of Charlotte Brontė, better known as Currer Bell, but the biographer was determined to say a great deal: she therefore makes a pilgrimage to every spot where her heroine was ever known to have set her foot. -- Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1857