Brontë Society AGM 2024 + Annual Lecture with Graham Watson

Just before the AGM, the Annual Lecture of the Brontë Society will take place:

Annual Brontë Society Lecture 2024

Saturday 5 October, 1pm - 2pm (BST)

Adapting the past: the collaboration of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell

by Graham Watson, author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë.

Tickets: Brontë Society members, free; non-members, £5

Online (Zoom)

Graham Watson is a writer and editor. He grew up in the west of Scotland and studied English literature and language at the University of Glasgow. The Invention of Charlotte Brontë is his first book.

Based entirely on new research and first-hand material, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë reconstructs the last five years in the life of the iconic author. It tells in detail for the first time the extraordinary events that produced Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and the media scandal that erupted on its publication, resulting in it being banned and rewritten twice in six months. Despite being one of English literature’s most contested biographies, it has influenced everything written on the Brontë family ever since, with a consensus that assumes Gaskell was misled by her sources, rendering the book unreliable.

However, through a forensic examination of Gaskell’s research into Charlotte Brontë’s life, her judicious analysis of conflicting witness testimonies, and an exploration of the aggrieved nature of the challenges Life received which led Gaskell to terminate the scandal it caused by falsely admitting error, Graham Watson demonstrates that the truth about Gaskell’s account cannot be the open and shut case we have always been led to believe.