Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Brontë describes her creative process; Gaskell describes Brontë’s switch to talkative alternate personality

Alternate Personalities Dictate

“…imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?” (1, p. 255).

“When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master—which will have its own way—putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully-elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is it not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?” (1, pp. 260-261).

Brontë Switches Personalities

At school in Brussels:

“…Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable. Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well—on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking” (1, p. 162).

When Switching Personalities:

“…Women will frequently turn their faces away, momentarily shield their faces with their hands, or let their hair fall over their faces during the moment of switching” (2, p. 121).

1. Elizabeth Gaskell. The Life of Charlotte Bronte [1857], Edited by Elisabeth Jay. Penguin Books, 1997.

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.