1. Elizabeth Gaskell,The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. by J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 337.
2. On 1 January 1855 Gaskell writes to Catherine Winkworth, ‘Miss Brontë’s letterisvery nice; I wish she’d write to me, — should I to her? Last time I wrote, it was a sort of explanation of my way of looking at her Church […] and religion; intended for her husband’s benefit. She never answered it’.The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 327.
3. There have been various arguments for other causes: Elizabeth Haldane, for example, points to Charlotte Brontë’s fall from a horse during her honeymoon, as ‘an accident […] which one fancies may have had some connection with her untimely death’. Elizabeth Haldane,Mrs Gaskell and Her Friends(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), p. 158.
4. Alan Shelston, ‘Introduction’, inThe Life of Charlotte Brontëby Elizabeth Gaskell (Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1975), p. 10.
5. Philip Rhodes, ‘A Medical Appraisal of the Brontës’,Brontë Society Transactions, 16:2 (1972), 101–09 (p. 106).