Mrs. Gaskell was quite clear about her priorities when she began to set down the facts of e "wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it". The result was one of the greatest of all English biographies. The book itself was not to be without its stormy passage - Mrs. Gaskell, as well she knew, would run up against Victorian shibboleths of propriety and sexual prudery. However, not even the amendments and cuts she was obliged to make in the second and third editions could destroy its overall unity of her psychologically convincing vision of the suffering, emotionally starved and tortured Charlotte Bronte whose life and pitiful death still grip and appall us.