Abstract
By examining Charlotte Brontë’s domestic responsibilities in her West Yorkshire home after the deaths of her siblings, this essay considers the relationship of unwed daughters and widowed fathers in real life and nineteenth-century fiction. Early biographical depictions, beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, tend to present Brontë during these years as an angel-in-the-house literary figure, sacrificing her independence as an intellectual and writer in order to care for her ageing father and maintain the domestic sphere of the parsonage. This essay attempts to reconcile this romanticized, and perhaps mythologized, depiction of Brontë with a more realistic vision of her productive literary life.
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