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Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of her close friend and confidant Charlotte Bronte was published in 1857 to immediate public acclaim, and remains the most influential and authoritative examination of the complex and mysterious author who gave Jane Eyre the subtitle An Autobiography. It recalls Charlotte Bronte's life from her confined and difficult childhood, through her years as a writer who had 'foreseen the single life' for herself, to her marriage at thirty-eight and death less than one year later. The resulting work - the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist - explored the nature of Charlotte's genius and almost single-highhandedly created the Bronte mystique and legend.