Two Literary Ladies: Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Brontë

Abstract

AbstractOn The walls of the National Portrait Gallery in London are George Richmond's portraits of two ladies who, at the end of those now almost fabulous 40's of the 19th Century, won by their first novels, published within a few months of each other, a fame that was brilliant, sudden and lasting. Neither lady was in her first youth when her novels appeared, and such were the circumstances of their lives that it seemed hardly likely that their paths would ever cross. And yet at the time they sat to George Richmond they had learned to admire each other, had corresponded, had met in the house of a friend and had started that all too brief but sincere, if curious, friendship which was to place each under an immeasurable debt to the other and was to link their names in a lasting union.