Modern Medical Knowledge: Brontë Biography and the Deaths of the Authors

Chapter 2 traces the representation of contagion in accounts of the Brontës’ deaths in biographies from Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë through the twentieth century and up to the more recent past. Brontë’s biography has a long and vexed relationship to Brontë’s scholarship, particularly in the case of 1970s’ and 1980s’ enthusiasm for retrodiagnosing Charlotte Brontë with hyperemesis gravidarum. That diagnosis, made by Sir Philip Rhodes in 1972, was reiterated in several biographies and proved influential, with some critics inferring the neuroticism then associated with that diagnosis in Brontë’s novels. Less controversially but equally importantly, this chapter argues, the ways in which biographers have at times downplayed and times emphasized the potentially contagious aspects of the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë reveal much about the extent to which they have been willing to consider those writers as inhabiting a contagious world or even being vectors of contagion themselves.