**The first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist, which was almost single-handedly responsible for creating the Brontë myth ‘A classic in its own right, still read today as one of the great works of Victorian literature’ Lucasta Miller** Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of her close friend Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the sub-title ‘An Autobiography’. It recounts Charlotte Brontë’s life from her isolated 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 a year later. The resulting work – the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist – explores the nature of Charlotte’s genius and almost single-handedly created the Brontë myth. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Elisabeth Jay