The Brontë Myth

by Lucasta Miller

Following the Brontë sisters through their many reincarnations at the hands of biographers, Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontës themselves. Their first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, transformed their story of literary ambition into one of the great legends of the 19th century, a dramatic tale of three lonely sisters playing out their tragic destiny on top of a windswept moor. Lucasta Miller reveals where this image came from and how it took such a hold on the popular imagination.

Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. The Brontë Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture. It is a witty, erudite and refreshingly unsentimental unravelling of what Henry James described as "the most complete intellectual muddle ever achieved on a literary question by our wonderful public."

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Books About Books, Literary Criticism, Biography Memoir, Victorian

369 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2001

Reviews

[Scarlett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was twelve the first time I picked up Wuthering Heights. I read it twice in a row and afterward felt as if I had been changed in some inexplicable way- for better or worse, I couldn’t quite say, but I knew I was affected nonetheless. After my journey through the moors was complete, I flipped to the front of the book and read the introduction. And yes, I was fascinated to read an analysis of Wuthering Heights, but what really caught my attention was Emily. Her supposedly dark and dreary childhood, filling her time in an imaginary world she created with her siblings and publishing a groundbreaking novel under a male pseudonym, I was hooked. Never before had I been so fascinated by an author. I read Charlotte’s biographical notice of her sisters, then her preface to Wuthering Heights, and made a snap second decision that I despised her. At twelve, I wasn’t quite able to grasp why Charlotte would be practically apologizing for both of her sisters’ works. It was obvious Charlotte didn’t quite understand Wuthering Heights, and found the work morally uncomfortable, which in turn made me uncomfortable with Charlotte. I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (which I adored), and you can imagine my horror when I discovered Charlotte had refused its republication after Anne’s death- that cemented my dislike of Charlotte for years to come. This is all very silly, I'm aware.

I did of course read Jane Eyre, and I of course loved it. But I had some strange separation in my mind, refusing to acknowledge that if Charlotte could write such an amazing work of art (and create the character Jane!), then perhaps she wasn’t all that bad. Even when I read biographies, articles, whatever new Bronte thing I could get my hands on (and there was always something new), I was never able to like her. The Bronte Myth was able to open my eyes. It was able to finally get me to let go of my twelve-year-old self's judgment I stubbornly refused to relinquish, and acknowledge the reasons she had to appear like an upstanding Victorian in order to survive, and protect her reputation. Not everyone can be Mary Shelley, or George Elliot, and you can’t expect all women to be so ahead of their time. Charlotte, in her writing, was radical, but in reality, she was very much a prim and proper Victorian lady- and while I would never want that for myself, it’s not something to condemn Charlotte for.

My fascination with the Bronte’s was never new of unique. The Bronte sisters have captured the public’s interest since their identities as three spinster sisters were revealed (even before the big revelation, as is discussed), and this book looks into that ongoing cultural fascination and how our perception of the Brontes has evolved over the years. The first 184 pages discuss Charlotte, how the myths surrounding her have evolved, and how she herself created many of them in order to shield her and her sisters from public scrutiny. The remaining 103 pages take a look at Emily, and mainly different biographers takes on her through the years, and how her elusiveness has helped her gain the mythic status she currently possesses. Unfortunately, the author does not deem Anne a subject worthy of discussion, which is incredibly disappointing. I can understand to a certain extent- Anne is not as well known, well read, or as well beloved as her other two sisters, and therefore does not have the same cultural wealth surrounding her- but I think she was worth at least a chapter or two! A chapter discussing the reasons why she is not as well known would have been interesting! (When Miller discusses how Charlotte’s portrayal of Emily as an uneducated provincial girl, both helped and hindered her sister’s legacy, it would have been the perfect time to discuss how Charlotte outright destroyed Anne’s own legacy. Anne’s clear masterpiece was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte preventing its republication after Anne’s death was a terrible act that I believe hurt Anne in the long run. Though in the short term, it was an act to help save her sister’s reputation.) I found the parts showing how Charlotte herself shaped the image of Emily after her death a wonderful discussion to be had, and it will likely be of interest to any major Wuthering Heights fans. Miller, more than any other author I’ve come across, delved into the rich intellectual life Emily must have had, and I found that gratifying. Too often Wuthering Heights is portrayed as an accidental masterpiece when it was, in fact, painstakingly crafted by a well-read genius, very much aware of what she was creating.

The book, as stated previously, is separated in two, the first half being Charlotte’s. When I picked this up, I was unaware of the separation and was worried the book only discussed Charlotte- so just be aware that you won’t get much Emily until later. As someone who prefers Emily over Charlotte, it is only natural I found Emily’s half more intriguing, as I imagine anyone more interested in Charlotte would find the first half to be superior. The entire thing, however, is great. Charlotte’s half is a bit more thorough I believe, and documenting how Charlotte herself created the myths surrounding her family was fascinating.

I have a few criticisms (in an ironic twist, during the chapter Miller is discussing the lies of psychobiography, she does a bit of psychoanalyzing herself, and I felt the evidence she provided- really there was none- was insufficient), but only one that I think hindered the book in the long run. The book does what it says on the tin- discussing the legacy of the Brontes. However, I think it would have been beneficial to discuss how perceptions of the novels (mainly Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights) have evolved through the ages. She does this a bit with Wuthering Heights, but not with Jane Eyre, and it was disappointing. Jane Eyre has such a rich history surrounding it, and not exploring it more thoroughly is simply a crime.

So do I recommend this book? Yes- but only to Bronte enthusiasts. It is not just necessary to have read their novels; you have to be well and truly obsessed with the Bronte’s to get this book completely. If you are a budding Bronte enthusiast, read some biographies on them, and only after accumulating some knowledge (and perhaps holding some of your own misconceptions, as is almost inevitable) do I suggest picking this up. This is a book for people belonging to the Bronte cult- and while I think someone with a basic knowledge of the sisters could read and enjoy this, I don’t think they will get the full experience out of this book as the ones are more obsessed.

[Janelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting and enjoyable read mostly about Charlotte and Emily Bronte and how the mythology about the family became the story, and not their incredible writing. The initial Victorian response to their books was horror, a woman couldn’t have written with such passion (and if it was a woman then she’s unfeminine!) and the themes were coarse. Lucasta Miller covers a lot of territory in this book. She discusses initial reactions to the novels and the initial biography by Mrs Gaskell which created the original Bronte myths. Then she proceeds to talk about later biographies and the various interpretations, movies etc into the twentieth century. It’s quite fascinating to see how the interpretations of the sisters lives have changed in that time. Often it says more about the biographer themselves than any new discoveries about the Brontes!

[Preslee Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always fascinated with authors and events in their lives that inspired their works. So, of course, after finishing Jane Eyre, I saw this book and thought I'd give it a try. Although this book took me forever to get through (this is why I rated it 4/5), because I'd rather be reading fantasies, I found it fascinating and beautifully written!!

This book isn't a biography on the Brönte sisters, but rather an examination of their legends and cultural significances over time. It goes into how the Brönte sisters' story became commercialized and their lives became spectacles. To how Charlotte's image changed with the feminist movement and how Emily was brought more into light.

There is so much I can talk about here. Miller does a fantastic job of reviewing top critics of the Brönte sisters and their works. My main question is, when will we focus on the youngest Brönte sister? We've focused on Charlotte from the 1850-1950s, and Emily from the 1940s til present. When is it Anne's turn? Is she the "new" Brönte sister the world will rave over in the 21st century??

[Moira]

I'd had this book for years (the flyleaf indicates I bought it in 2004) and have been looking forward to reading it for such a long while I suppose it's only natural to be a little disappointed in it. I wish it had been more exhaustive and scholarly, but by the same token it's thankfully free of academic jargon. The style is fresh and engaging, if too colloquial at times. The book is roughly divided into two parts, detailing the posthumous reputations of first Charlotte and then Emily. Anne is considered on her own for about two pages, which is disappointing; for that and other reasons I found the title a bit misleading. I thought Miller would focus more on the cultural influence of the Brontes, especially how their works have become woven into high and low culture, rather than on the two sisters themselves as mythical figures. I found the chapters on Emily a lot more interesting than the ones concerning Charlotte, perhaps because Miller spends a great deal of time on Gaskell's biography, its errors, and its reception (which is indeed where a great deal of the myths about the Brontes get started, but there's been a lot more modern scholarship since then which gets treated glancingly only near the very end of both parts). The endnotes (no they're not footnotes people, look it up in your MLA; DFW uses them correctly) alternate between scholarly-style citations with endless 'ibids' and information that would have been welcome in footnotes. (Am I the only one who misses gleaning nuggets of insight from a few citations at the bottom of every page rather than having to comb through daunting page after page of tiny type consisting mainly of page numbers?) (Yes, I even read footnotes. All the footnotes.) I liked the sections on Emily's literary influences, and how Charlotte had struggled to contain Emily, unwieldy even after death, in her memorial writings, and wished they had been longer. This book strikes me as more a roundup - and a good one - of a lot of trends in Bronte scholarship than a work of great originality, and it's a lot less deconstructionist than I had somehow thought (that might have had something to do with Miller's constant references to Janet Malcolm's 'The Silent Woman') (this is a good thing). It is certainly entertaining.

[Salma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Brontes were like Elvis in their day. I realize this comparison isn't the best, but I make it because, like people who claim to spot the "King's" ghost to this day and visit Graceland as if it's Eden, literary fans through the past three centuries have apparently spoken to the Bronte sisters through seances and continue to flock to Haworth Parsonage like it's their personal Mecca.

What made three very simple clergyman's daughters reach the status of myth in Western culture? Lucasta Miller explores this question. For me, personally, it is difficult to think of any books that equal Wuthering Heights, Villete, or Jane Eyre in brilliance (especially WH). But others may disagree- many hold authors such as Thackeray and Austen, even George Eliot, in higher esteem. Yet these authors don't have the mystique and sheer awe surrounding them that the Brontes do. Why is that?

The answer, as Miller postulates, is very simple and quite sad. And it can be traced to one woman. Elizabeth Gaskell.

When the Brontes' novels were first published, they were instantly claimed as genius. But here's the catch- that was when people thought the authors were men (they'd written under masculine pseudonyms, as most of you already know). When word somehow got out that Currer, Acton, and Ellis were really Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, people didn't know what to think. They were horrified that women should have written works of such passion. It wasn't right. The authors, naturally, must have mental problems, which must be rooted in a tragic life.

Elizabeth Gaskell took this last theory and ran with it in her "Life of Charlotte Bronte," written after Charlotte's death. Gaskell wrote some excellent novels herself, and although rich in depth and societal criticism, fire-women like Cathy and Jane cannot be found in her books. She didn't think it was normal for such women to exist in the female imagination. This could only happen, she decided, because the Brontes had led such an oppressive life that writing disturbing novels became their drug.

It is undeniable that the Brontes had had serious tragedies in their lives- such as the loss of their mother, siblings, and of course, Branwell's famous descent into addiction. But their lives were also balanced with fun, companionship, and travel. Gaskell downplays or excludes ALL the positive in their lives. On top of that, she completely makes up horrifying (and baseless) stories about Patrick Bronte, the patriarch of the family and various other Bronte acquaintances, so that it seems that Charlotte, Emily, Anne were mere Cinderellas in a world that was one giant Wicked Stepmother. It's interesting to note that Gaskell left town after the book's publication because she was afraid of the attack of libel lawyers.

Well, the lawyers attacked anyway (rightly so), and Gaskell was forced to revise the next editions of her book. But the damage was already done, and the myth had been created. Gaskell's biography was the basis of all Bronte bios that followed through the years, so the myth remained(s).

The rest of the book follows the creation and attempted unraveling of this myth. Miller writes with humor and clarity- her prose is as lucid as if she were receiving direction from the Bronte sisters themselves.

The book's one flaw is its lack of focus on Anne. Miller mentions in one page how sad it is that Anne has never gotten proper acknowledgement from biographers, and then does the same thing herself! Honestly, that was the only thing keeping me from giving this book a full five stars. Nevertheless, Bronte fans must get their hands on this book.

[Girl with her Head in a Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review originally published here: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2...

When I wrote my guest post for the start of this week, I wanted to examine the way in which the Brontës had come to be perceived down the centuries. I named my topic "The Brontë Myth". Shortly afterwards, I discovered through my reading that Lucasta Miller had written an acclaimed book with the same title back in 2002. Predictably, I decided to Find Out More. What I discovered was a compelling and concise account of Brontëmania, as well as a fascinating examination of the art of biography itself. In terms of brooding material, frankly I had struck gold.

This was utterly different to the two other biographies I read for Brooding about the Brontës, since Miller is less interested in the traditional linear approach and in essence, her story really starts around 1855 when Charlotte died and the myth-making really moved into over-drive. However, Miller swiftly unmasks Charlotte as the first myth-maker, pointing out that far from being the innocent and unknowing parson's daughter who accidentally stumbled upon writing one of the finest novels in the English language, Charlotte was an ambitious writer who wrote as a teenager to the poet Robert Southey explaining her desire 'to be forever known'.

We see Charlotte's myth-making in the biographical notice she wrote for each of her sisters, when she attempted to protect their reputations by claiming that they were too innocent to understand what they were writing and certainly intended no offence. She play-acted as Currer Bell. Miller casts a dubious eye over the myth of Charlotte as socially anxious, pointing out that on one occasion, Charlotte was supposed to be shaking in terror after being introduced by Thackeray as the author of Jane Eyre, but to others it seemed as if she was in fact seething in rage.

Mrs Gaskell here steps in. Her role within the Brontë myth is a very unsettling one and while she may have intended no malice, she certainly caused untold hurt. She seems to have had a strange fascination with the life of her 'friend', appearing even to befriend Charlotte only to find out more. Gaskell was determined to find Haworth Parsonage remote and unpleasant, so was disappointed to discover that cheery flowers grew in the window boxes - in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, she was careful to emphasise that they weren't particularly nice plants. Gaskell wanted the Parsonage to be a Gothic house of horrors, so that Charlotte only wrote unsettling books as a symptom of her suffering. Despite their friendship, Charlotte was irritated by the stories cast about by Gaskell and Harriet Martineau that she was sickly and suffering, claiming that in their eyes 'I shall be a sort of invalid' and Miller points out one biographer's theory that this was the reason that George Smith never proposed - he believed Gaskell's story-telling.

life of charlotteAfter Charlotte's death, Gaskell was approached to write the official biography after several upsetting rumours had caused pain to the family. What Arthur and Patrick seemed unaware of was that it was Mrs Gaskell who had started the rumours in the first place. They both learnt to their personal cost that it is unwise to put the biography in the hands of a novelist, particularly one like Mrs Gaskell. Unlike Charlotte, Mrs Gaskell's novels tend towards the 'morally improving' brand - Miller takes particular pleasure in ripping apart Ruth, whereby Gaskell seeks to draw sympathy to the fates of fallen women by writing a novel about one, but then is too afraid about the consequences to her own reputation to write her convincingly. Thus Ruth may be seduced, but it seems to happen without her noticing and she remains otherwise angelic. Miller's implication is clear - someone like Mrs Gaskell was never going to understand as complex and contradictory a being as Charlotte.

Yet, it is Mrs Gaskell who began the Brontë myth-making which is still happening today. Time and again, Miller points out how subsequent biographies follow her trail in 'walking up to the Parsonage', rich in purple prose describing the remote and grim setting. Visitors to the Parsonage were always surprised to find it a pleasant building in the middle of a thriving village, only a few steps away from the library and post office. Contrary to rumour, Charlotte could not look out the window and see the tragic graves of her siblings - they were buried inside the church. They also travelled and took part in local cultural activities. Gaskell reported some of these facts but was always careful to point out that joy died for Charlotte at the age of nine when her sisters passed away. After that, according to Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, she never experienced a moment of happiness again.

Miller emphasises how far this fits into the Victorian template of ideal heroine - a true saintly heroine dies at the end of the book. Gaskell rewrote Charlotte to being exactly one such, but one has to wonder how far she would have appreciated it. Charlotte was the creator of Jane Eyre, consummate survivor who abjured self-denial as foolish and insisted that God had not given her life to simply throw it away. I was reminded too of the attitude of Charlotte's best friend Mary Taylor - in Miss Miles, one of her heroines Dora complains of her situation that people would prefer it if she died as it would make a tidier story but she stubbornly refuses to do so and instead is determined to live on and thrive. Miller's distaste for this fashion is clear, particularly Gaskell's incredible insensitivity in publishing anecdotes about Charlotte's underwear size and private correspondence, none of which had been in the remit outlined by Patrick and Arthur. I was particularly disgusted by Gaskell's implication that Patrick's unpleasantness caused the death of his wife Maria - one cannot help but feel that cancer was more deserving of blame there.

More than anything though, this fashion took away from Charlotte the novelist. Gaskell steered well away from the 'upsetting' elements of her work, preferring to stick with stories about Charlotte peeling potatoes in secret so that the family servant Tabby did not have to. Even though it was Emily who mostly kept house, Gaskell recasts Charlotte as the ultimate dutiful daughter to a domestic tyrant - the angel in the house. Gaskell also completely omitted any reference to Charlotte's passion for her teacher Monsieur Heger, although she was clearly uneasy lest the correspondence ever come out, knowing that her version of events would be forever sullied. The 'bomb', as Miller describes it, finally went off in 1918 and the result for Brontëmania was messy.

Gaskell put the blame for the 'coarseness' or 'morbidity' of the girls' writing on the effects of witnessing Branwell's behaviour. Indeed, she even made a very (very) thinly veiled attack on Lady Scott, erstwhile Mrs Robinson who had an affair with Branwell, claiming that in corrupting him, she not only hastened his end but also that of his sisters. The book even includes a call for her to repent. Lady Scott sued, Gaskell's husband settled and the section was removed in the next edition. The problem of Branwell, how to excuse him, how to explain him has persisted down the centuries - despite the paucity of his literary output, in this book he gets more coverage than does Anne.

The interesting thing was how Charlotte could appear as an example for young girls in conduct books, but then her books themselves would be held as inappropriate. Charlotte was a saint not because of her literary talent, but because she stayed home and looked after her horrible father and her sufferings were so terrible that she was carried off to heaven. Yes she wrote some books but she could be forgiven for that. In discovering Charlotte had a passionate side, that she wrote of wanting recognition from Heger - for many of her devoted fans, this became a betrayal. For May Sinclair, who held passionately to her spinsterdom, her furious rejection of the evidence has the note of personal grief.

By contrast, the myth-making around Emily tends towards painting her as a mystic. As such an innocent, utterly uneducated, surely she would have been incapable of writing a book like Wuthering Heights. It could only have come to her in a vision. Again, Miller is mildly sardonic as she recounts the varying accounts and theories, some of which render Emily as more animal than human, none of which seem to have stopped to recognise that she read books. A particularly purple passage has Emily walking with her family in the moors 'making noises' which those close to her know are expressive of 'joy' - no wonder the theory that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights gained traction.

Another popular theory had it that Emily must have had a lover to have inspired her work, culminating in a particularly hilarious incident in the 1930s when biographer Virginia Moore was unable to read Emily's handwriting and so concluded that her poem 'Love's Farewell' was actually entitled 'Louis Parensall' - so Emily must, necessarily, have had a French lover. Deciding that Emily must have had assignations with him in Branwell's portrait studio in Bradford, the theory was doing fairly nicely until someone pointed out the obvious.

This was another of those books where practically every page feels worthy of noting down. Having written (in far shorter form and with only a fraction of the research) on a similar topic, reading Miller's book felt like sitting down for coffee with a new friend and breathlessly agreeing with their every utterance. Miller has trawled through the vast hoards of Brontë biography and mercilessly lists even the most ridiculous of theories, particularly prevalent in her chapter on the fashion of 'psychobiography'. One pointed out that Charlotte died aged thirty-eight, the same age that her mother had passed away. Naturally this meant that subconsciously, Charlotte had never recovered from her mother's death and that she instead chose to die at the same age since she could not surpass her. Another theory held that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights with thirty-four chapters since that was the age that Jesus was when he died. At this point, Stella Gibbons' Mr Mybug begins to look quite normal.

My only criticism would be how little the book had to say about Anne. It is true that very few of the myths touch on her - but that in itself is interesting. There is something in the power of three - if there had been only Charlotte and Emily, I do wonder if the myths would have grown so huge. The Brontës are 'the weird sisters', and they are more than just a duo. Miller notes rather philosophically that Emily's true personality (and presumably that of Anne as well) may very well have been lost in the maelstrom of all of the biographies. It is risky even to read too much into their poetry given that so much of it was rooted in their imaginary world of Gondal. Yet Emily's star rose as Charlotte's fell - no longer a saint due to her passion for a married man, Charlotte became instead the cold-hearted spinster who wrote for commercial gain rather than due to a visitation of the creative muse. Even Juliet Barker's seminal biography is rather unsympathetic towards her - the reader has learnt to distrust Charlotte's version of events.

Yet I feel that even a non-Brontë fan could enjoy The Brontë Myth for the efforts it puts in to deconstruct the art of biography itself. Miller examines how each new generation feels the need to 'discover' the Brontës in a fresh way, how new approaches tease out new theories. Yet, the aim of biography itself has shifted. Increasingly it is recognised that nobody has but one self, indeed many of us have thousands. Those who lauded Charlotte as paragon may have been misled, but surely it is equally erroneous to label her a harridan. The Brontë Myth is almost meta-fictional in its birds-eye view of Brontë-mania and biographical writing as a whole, examining the journey from hagiography (Gaskell), to psychobiography and on to where we are now. One can almost picture Miller's curled lip when she describes one early biographer who explained that 'happy people are not writers', but on the whole she shows a remarkable sympathy to the fact that people do wish to write and rewrite their interpretations of the Brontës. Even where a theory is light on evidence, Miller is willing to be charitable if the author has shown a genuine attempt to connect with their subject.

Yet there is a tragedy around all of this story-telling - Miller notes that when she explained to an acquaintance that she was writing a book on the Brontës, they said vaguely, "Oh yes, those were fictional characters, weren't they?" I myself became a Brontë fan at the age of five when I first visited the Parsonage, years and years before I read the books. There is a detachment between the notion of the Brontës the novelists and the Brontës the inhabitants of Haworth. With the final lines, Miller urges us to 'turn the tables' and consider the novels first. Through this week, I have realised that I am as guilty as the next reader of disregarding the texts - I have been biased against Charlotte because as a five year-old, I thought she looked bossy in her portrait. I preferred Anne perhaps for simply being the youngest. Before they were the Brontë Sisters, they were the Brothers Bell, because they wanted to be judged for their works alone - the time is here to look away from the portrait with the washed out Branwell looming from the beyond and instead look to their works.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Brontë Myth is a "metabiography", a book about biography, in which Miller examines the myths and mysteries which have developed around the Brontë sisters, from Elizabeth Gaskell's seminal biography of Charlotte, which portrayed her as a Victorian saint, to the more recent conception of Emily as "the mystic of the moors". It's fascinating stuff, starting with Charlotte's shaping of herself and of her sisters through her comments on their books, her rewriting of Emily's poems, and the stories she told Gaskell.

I did wish for more material on Anne, the oft-neglected sister who wrote perhaps the most scandalous (and underrated) of all their novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; perhaps some enterprising scholar will continue Miller's work with more on Anne. That cavil aside, though, The Brontë Myth is a marvelously compelling book, packed with fascinating facts and insights.

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography about the Brontes, brings forth how the prejudice of their time has kept them from being understood at the great writers they are. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are unique, original masterpieces that the Victorians were unwilling to accept as written by women and if they were, that there was something horribly wrong with them.

[Kathleen Flynn]

This is a well-written, erudite, informative and often very funny book. It was one of the earliest I read back in 2013 when I first had a notion of writing something about the Brontes. It's still one of the best.

Is there such a thing as metabiograhy? If so, this is a fine example. It discusses not so much the Brontes (primarily Charlotte and Emily; sorry, Anne) per as as the history of how they have been written about in the century and a half since their death. It explores many of the wackier theories surrounding them (particularly the elusive Emily) as well as surveying some of the fiction, movies, plays and poetry inspired by the Brontes' lives and works.

As the title suggests, the Brontes have become larger than life, and for many years they were more famous for their life stories (highly fictionalized and overheated, thanks to Mrs. Gaskell and those who followed) than for their novels. A paradoxical outcome, since it was the books that made them famous in the first place.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me quite literally two years to hunker down and read this book, but I am glad I finally got around to it.

There's a lot of Bronte-stuff floating around, books, plays, movies, weird things on Etsy, and I am very guilty of loving of all of them. But in this book Lucasta Miller goes to great lengths to detail how reactions to the Brontes were shaped, and how they have evolved through the changes from the Victorian era to modernity. She writes with very accessible prose very effectively about a fairly large period of time. The first half of the book is dedicated to Charlotte's reputation, especially how it is shaped by both Charlotte herself and Elizabeth Gaskell. The second half focuses on Emily's reputation, especially within the 20th century. There is very, very little focus on Anne (which is fairly typical of biographies that claim to cover all the Brontes), and a little bit of Patrick and Branwell are sprinkled in, though of course their cultural portrayals depend upon the portrayals of the sisters.

[V. Briceland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miller's book isn't a biography—all the Brontes are dead and buried by the end of chapter two. Instead, it's an examination of the ways in which a manufactured and tweaked familial biography has informed and, at times, overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the three Bronte sisters.

Miller chronicles how, after the shocked and repulsed reaction of their contemporaries to the collected pseudonymous works of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, Charlotte Bronte immediately began fabricating a public image designed to thwart her critics. Her own ability to present herself as a modest paragon of humble womanhood, haunted by a remote upbringing, was amplified further by Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous biography, which largely disregarded fact in favor of myth-building. By the late nineteenth century, the Bronte cult was so captivated by a romantic (and largely inaccurate) picture of the Bronte's upbringing, that any sober consideration of their actual works seemed beside the point.

It was a myth that, in more modern times, Miller shows to have been transformed by changing tastes and the needs of popular culture. Twentieth-century reinterpretations of it sexed it up, used it as a mirror for its own theoretical lenses, and even thrust what they perceived as dowdy Charlotte into the background in favor of neglected and modern-spirited Emily. It would seem that to every era, the story of the Bronte family becomes what it needs to become—regardless of what it actually was.

Given her focus on myth-building and on sorting out the facts of the Brontes' upbringing from the fictions that have since accumulated, it seems churlish to wish for more of a consideration of the novels than Miller makes in this volume. But to decry previous generations for the same neglect she exhibits herself, by and large, seems to undo a tiny bit of the good work she's done here in this engrossing volume of social and literary history.

[Furqan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent literary biography succeeds in its bold attempt to debunk the myth surrounding the lives of Brontë family - the myth which was created by Charlotte Brontë herself, and later embellished and perpetuated by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell in her classic, though very misleading biography: The Life of Charlotte Brontë.

Miller confidently reveals the motivations behind the genesis of the myth and how it came to and still to some extent continue to cloud our perception of the "real" Brontës. The author undoubtedly has done her research and the book is filled with fascinating and often humorous details concerning the 'cultural accretion' of the myth (I am assuming that people who are interested in this book will be familiar with the myth of Brontës) and how it was fabricated by each successive generation. E.g. the Victorian myth of Charlotte was a 'self-sacrificing and dutiful daughter', but with the rise of psychoanalysis in 20th century, she was turned into a sexually-repressed maniac! And that Emily Bronte's genius was somehow divinely inspired or she was anorexic and a lesbian. Right...

My only complain with the book is the lack of enough biographical information regarding Anne Brontë. Miller makes a valid point of Anne being unfairly overshadowed by her older sisters and yet she goes on to devote only few paragraphs to her?

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up thinking it would be an accurate biography of the Bronte sisters, instead it's a critique of every biography written about Charlotte and Emily (nobody seems to care much about Anne) from just after Charlotte's death to almost the date of publish.

I thought I knew something about Charlotte but most of a what I knew was incorrect. They were outright lies and misdirections deliberately spread around by her first biographer.

Later biographers twisted the sisters in every way, making them sound like sad, shrunken women, resigned to their fate of dying slowly of consumption while watching their father burn rugs and their brother turn into an opium fiend. (the opium thing is true but their father was very loving and as far as anyone can tell, never burned even a pot holder)

I've never liked Emily's Wuthering Heights, her tale of obsessive love seemed full of the kinds of ridiculous things that could only happen if a bunch of hallucinating narcissists decided to take over a quiet English county, but it's an intelligent work. It was sad to see how from the very beginning her intelligence and creativity were shelved and replaced with the "wanderer of the moor" who wrote by some mystical process that bypassed the brain completely.

This book was not the biography I was expecting, instead it's serious academic work that manages to be entertaining, not a bad trade off.

[Thom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must be one of the few for which this was a disappointing read. I won't go on and on except to point out a few things:

1) Almost nothing about Anne, who in my estimation was the most talented of the lot. If a writer is going to write about a family like this one, I personally want equal attention paid to all. And that should include Branwell also.

2) Fairly little attention (perhaps for self supporting reasons) paid by the author to those books which have already addressed many of the issues she and others have with Gaskin's work.

3) I also found the writing to be too much of an academic style. At times turgid and endless while making certain points. Although at times the book is entertaining as well.

4) I appreciate the time, effort and research the author has done. It's a lot of work. But her conclusions are at times a bit of a stretch. I can't help feel there was TOO much effort put into being contrarian as opposed to striking a balance when it comes to the legend or myth of this family. Again, I've seen it done better elsewhere.

[Laura McNeal · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you had asked me if I like metabiography I probably would have said no but clearly I love it beyond all reason. I didn’t realize when I idly tipped the book into my arms at the library (always wanting to add to my shopping cart when the goods are free and will mark me to passersby and librarians as a Free-Roaming Intellectual) that I had already read and loved a Lucasta Miller metabiography: Keats: A Life in Nine Poems. This book is perhaps nerdier but not less delicious if you would like to hear someone talk brilliantly, as if at some dreamworld dinner party, about Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, the history of literary biography, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Charles Swinburne, Stella Gibbons, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath. Is it dawn yet? Do go on, Lucasta. I’m not the least bit tired.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably 3.5 - but found it a little repetitive. Nothing on Ann.

[Charles Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review originally ran in the San Jose Mercury News on January 25, 2004:

You probably think of ''Jane Eyre'' as the kind of novel you'd feel safe in recommending to a 12-year-old girl (if you know a 12-year-old girl who'd read a novel about a Victorian governess instead of the latest dish about Paris Hilton).

But as the British critic Lucasta Miller tells us in her provocative history of the reputation of the Bronte sisters and their work, when Charlotte Bronte's novel was published in 1847, readers were shocked, shocked by it (which means, naturally, that it sold a lot of copies). It was vilified with those curious Victorian epithets ''coarse'' and ''morbid'' -- indications that it was sexier and psychologically more unsettling than the readers were used to.
Charlotte wasn't the only Bronte to shock the Victorians. Anne, now the least famous of the sisters, may have caused the most scandal with her novel ''The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,'' because it took direct aim at the subjugation of women -- the novel's heroine flees from her marriage to a dissolute and abusive man. (Conventional fiction would have shown her patiently suffering the marriage and converting him with the example of her virtue, just as conventional fiction would have had Jane Eyre marry St. John Rivers and go off to do missionary work in India instead of returning to Mr. Rochester.) The author was denounced for a ''morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal'' and the book was called ''revolting.''
Nor did Emily's ''Wuthering Heights'' escape charges of morbid coarseness (or coarse morbidity). It was also called ''too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers.'' But the Victorians seem to have found the high passions and narrative intricacies of that great mad book as much puzzling as offensive; it didn't achieve full recognition as a classic until the 20th century, when Emily's reputation began to eclipse Charlotte's and the novel's ironies and ambiguities came in vogue.
The novels were published under male pseudonyms -- Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell -- but even when it became known that the Bells were really the Bronte sisters the criticism was not modulated. Quite a few people felt ''that women were naturally debarred by their limited abilities from the 'properly masculine power of writing books,' '' says Miller, quoting the minor Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, the author of a treacly (and hugely popular) sequence of poems about married bliss called ''The Angel in the House.''
The criticism took a toll on Charlotte, especially in the terrible months from September 1848 to May 1849 that saw the deaths of her brother, Branwell, and her sisters. But she continued to write, publishing two more novels, ''Shirley'' in 1849 and ''Villette'' in 1853, still under the guise of ''Currer Bell.'' And in 1850 Charlotte decided to memorialize her sisters by reprinting ''Wuthering Heights'' and Anne's novel ''Agnes Grey,'' along with a selection of their poems, and to preface them with a ''Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell.''

'Wildfell Hall' a mistake
She refused, however, to reprint ''The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'' and called the novel ''an entire mistake.'' As Miller observes, the tone of the ''Biographical Notice'' is apologetic in the extreme: ''To clear her sisters of the charge of coarseness, she presented them as a couple of simple, uneducated country girls who did not really know what they were doing. . . . She argued that her sisters were innocent girls, inhabitants of a 'remote district where education had made little progress.' ''
And that was the beginning of what Miller calls ''the Bronte myth,'' furthered by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose biography, ''The Life of Charlotte Bronte,'' appeared in 1857, two years after Charlotte's death.
Gaskell was a fine novelist -- ''Cranford'' is highly readable, and her novels about the working class, such as ''Mary Barton'' and ''North and South,'' drew fire from conservatives for their portrayal of factory owners -- and ''The Life of Charlotte Bronte'' is as skillfully told as any of her works of fiction. But domestic respectability was uppermost among the values of awoman who published as ''Mrs. Gaskell.''
So in writing about Charlotte Bronte's life, Miller says, ''Mrs. Gaskell, a happily married mother of four surviving children, implicitly defines the spinster Miss Bronte as a victim.'' She created the legend of the Bronte home, Haworth Parsonage, as ''a place of gothic horror,'' a house surrounded by graveyards, on the edge of desolate moors, where doom-haunted siblings suffered under the tyranny of a stern, blind father. Gaskell ''coped with the disturbing passion and intensity of Charlotte's work by regarding it as morbid, the sad consequence of a mind made sick by a life of continual suffering and deprivation.''

'Superior male judgment'
Gaskell also wanted to show that Charlotte was truly feminine in the Victorian manner. As a novelist herself, Gaskell could hardly join people like Patmore in classing novel-writing as an ''unfeminine'' pursuit, so she tried to make sure that Charlotte didn't come across as ''unduly ambitious and pushy in her quest to become an author.'' She included an anecdote about Charlotte turning to her brother, Branwell, for advice, ''to show the creator of the fiery 'Jane Eyre' deferring to superior male judgment,'' Miller says.
Gaskell's biography succeeded in putting a whole new spin on Charlotte's life, and it colored the reaction to her novels. ''Jane Eyre'' had been adapted for the stage in the late 1840s and 1850s; these versions ''tended to remain close to Charlotte's original conception of her heroine, emphasizing Jane's spirited independence.'' But after Gaskell's biography became a bestseller, the stage adaptations turned Jane ''into a saintly exemplar of conventional feminine virtue'' -- a characterization that was still with us when Joan Fontaine played Jane in the 1944 movie version. (Fontaine's Jane Eyre is almost indistinguishable from the character she played in ''Rebecca'' -- not surprising, since the Daphne du Maurier novel is one of the many romantic knockoffs of ''Jane Eyre.'')
Gaskell's portrait of Charlotte had another unintended consequence: turning her into a respectable Victorian woman caused a backlash when the revolt against Victorian values came in the early 20th century. Charlotte's siblings -- especially the alcoholic, opium-addicted Branwell and the strange, shy Emily -- took on a glamour that she now lacked. As Miller tells us, Emily ''was recently voted twentieth most erotic person of the millennium, just ahead of Errol Flynn and Josephine Baker, in a poll among the readers of the Erotic Review.'' But more seriously, Emily's ''Wuthering Heights'' ascended in critical reputation as ''Jane Eyre'' declined.

Charlotte rehabilitated
It took the feminist critics of the '70s -- who have clearly influenced Miller -- to rehabilitate Charlotte, sweeping away the veils of respectability in which Gaskell had draped her and rediscovering the passionate, independent author of ''Jane Eyre.'' One of the key works of feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's ''The Madwoman in the Attic,'' elevated Mr. Rochester's mad wife, Bertha, into a symbol of the repression of women.
Miller covers all of the oscillations of the Brontes' reputation. They have been sentimentalized and sensationalized in movies, plays, novels and hack biographies, which Miller describes in often amusing detail. And they have been the subjects of febrile psychoanalyzing and wacky theories about their lives and books -- such as the undying claim that Branwell was the ''real'' author of ''Wuthering Heights,'' which, Miller says, shows ''how Victorian prejudices about writing and gender could be powerful enough to inspire men to try to erase the literary reputation of a woman.''
''The Bronte Myth'' is a first-rate work of scholarship and criticism, and a surprisingly entertaining read. And thanks to Miller's clearheadedness, it seems unlikely that the Brontes will ever again be marginalized into the spooky spinsters of the myth.

[Dorothea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is The Correct Book to Read Next when you've read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and one or two biographies of any or all of the Brontës and you're thinking about reading more and maybe even visiting Haworth if you ever get a chance. (If you have already been to Haworth and have read more of the Brontës' writing and more writing about the Brontës, and you haven't read The Brontë Myth yet, it is still The Correct Book to Read Next.)

Why? Because ever since readers first started speculating about who Currer Bell was, and whether Ellis and Acton Bell were really different people, and whether he/they/she were men or women, and how shocked to be by any of these possibilities, biographical information about the Brontës has been muddled by preconceived notions, insufficient data, unjustified interpretation of existing data, and sheer fantasy.

There isn't just one Brontë myth; there are lots, and they've mutated over time. And although standards for scholarship have improved, the documentable facts about the Brontës can't keep up with all the questions everyone has about their lives and works. One apparently well-researched biography gives a different reading of a certain episode than the scholarly introduction to the annotated edition of a Brontë novel; the reader starts to think that the only way to escape bias is to study nothing but the Brontës' own letters (and even then that avoids only other people's bias!).

Well, there's nothing wrong with reading the letters and diary papers and so on -- but if you've got to this point, it's time to read The Brontë Myth too. This is not another biography of any of the Brontës; it's a meta-biography: the history of Brontëmania, focusing especially on how and why stories about Charlotte and Emily Brontë have been told. It's a guide to all the biographies -- not intended to lead to the unmistakably true answers to all the questions we have, because those are probably irrecoverable -- but an explanation of the patterns in the story-telling, of how the stories relate to one another and to contemporary social narratives about gender or artistic inspiration or what have you.

This is complicated, of course, but here are two of the bigger patterns:

(1) The telling of Charlotte Brontë's life story was shaped nearly from the start by Elizabeth Gaskell, who befriended Charlotte and wrote the first biography of her within a couple of years of her death. Gaskell was not interested in finding out or reporting the unmistakably true answers; she was a novelist, she told stories with a moral purpose, and from her very first meeting with Charlotte she classified her as a feminine heroine purified through suffering. (This is, again, a lot more complicated -- the role played by Charlotte's own public persona(e) is particularly interesting.) The result was a book that I and many, many others have found extremely compelling, so much so that everything from apocryphal anecdotes to the structure of the first chapter (the journey to Haworth, up the hill, into the church, to read the grave-markers) have shaped subsequent biographies.

(2) Emily Brontë's biography, on the other hand, was originally the creation of Charlotte, who after her sisters' deaths found herself in charge of their public appearances, and who was (at least before the public) incapable of discussing Wuthering Heights unapologetically. Where did Emily get all of that shocking material? Not from her own heart or experience; she was simple, uneducated, innocent, and Inspired. From this we've got a hundred and fifty years of increasingly silly narratives about Wuthering Heights being a completely unique masterpiece that sprang fully-formed in Emily's otherwise blank brain as she wandered the moors. (The antidote to this isn't really complicated. We hardly know anything about Emily's personality, but we do know what kinds of reading material she and her siblings were exposed to. Byron was among this from the beginning; Emily learned to read Latin and German, and was certainly exposed to German as well as English Romanticism. Wuthering Heights may well be extraordinary, but it is far from independent of literary tradition.)

It's not by chance that the above paragraphs are about Charlotte and Emily; The Brontë Myth is about their biographies far more than any other Brontës'. Miller says almost nothing about Anne, because so few biographies of her have been written. (There have been some, though, and I wish she'd spent a little time on them -- for instance, while she was describing various biographers' desperate attempts to find a love-interest for Emily, I would have liked to see her reaction to Edward Chitham's identification of curate William Weightman as Anne's love-interest.) There's more about Branwell, because he figures more into Charlotte and Emily's biographies -- especially into Emily's (one of the myths is that Emily and Branwell were especially close; another is that Branwell secretly wrote Wuthering Heights). Patrick Brontë and Arthur Nicholls appear first as mediators of Gaskell's biography, then as Stern Patriarchal Tropes.

I do like that Miller identifies the Brontë family itself as a pattern. She says that biographers have often been so enthralled with the relationships between the family members, or with describing Charlotte or Emily in a domestic and personal setting, that they've lost sight of what makes these women interesting in the first place -- their work as writers. (Miller describes two recent biographies, both of which she praises, as examples of these different approaches: Juliet Barker's meticulously researched The Brontës presents so much information about the whole family that the reader could "forget that [Patrick, Branwell, Arthur Nicholls] would never have become biographical subjects in the first place if it had not been for the literary achievements of their female relatives." Lyndall Gordon's Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life "is most convincing when exploring the inner workings of the creative life.")

[Gillian Brownlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

"One could go even further into the question of why our culture still needs so many of its female icons--from Marylin Monroe to Princess Diana--to suffer and die, as if we want to see them punished for their fame."

This took me a while to get through, but mostly because I'm a slow reader when it comes to non-fiction. My main takeaways from this book were:

1. Everything I thought I knew about the Brontës was a fabrication.
2. I really want to re-read Wuthering Heights.
3. People cannot just accept that women can be talented authors.

I mean, honestly. Everyone got so obsessed with WHY the Brontës wrote what they did that the focus moved towards their lives rather than their literary contributions. It's intensely frustrating.

[Margery Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought the way the author traced the changing 'myth' of the Brontes lives, within the historical and cultural/moral context over time was really interesting. The chapters on Emily were particularly good. Also I had forgotten how *great* Cold Comfort Farm is and I think I will be rereading that this weekend. I am glad, though (back to The Bronte Myth), I read Juliet Barker's The Brontes before this book.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not read a lot of non-fiction, but this recommendation by my friend Daphne showed me that I should really reconsider this! I enjoyed reading this book, especially in the sense that it opened my eyes on how biography is interpretative and how different versions of the same historical person may enter posterity - and how myths may develop. Just some a critical note: I expected a chapter on Anne as well; the fact that she has not received much attention might have also been influenced by later interpretations or silencings of her work. I did not understand this omission, as the title 'The Brontë Myth' does not focus solely on Charlotte and Emily. All in all, this book was very informative and enjoyable to read, and makes me dust off Wuthering Heights again for a second read...

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, along with Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman, should show you everything you need to know about the difficulties of accurate biographies of writers.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between them, the three Brontë sisters of Yorkshire, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849) wrote a joint volume of poetry and several novels that granted them immortality in English literature. However, due to a variety of factors, the sisters themselves became objects of exaggeration and legend, and this nonfiction work explores how that development came about, and how the sisters are still seen, not as they really were, but as the ever-evolving myth presents them.

In 1847 a volume of Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell was published; the next year Jane Eyre by Currer Bell (Charlotte) was published, Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily) was published, and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Anne) was published. In 1848 Emily died, and in 1849 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Acton Bell (Anne) was published before her death. After her sisters died, Charlotte emerged from obscurity, admitted the true identities of the Bells, and published Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853) before getting married in 1854 and dying the next year in early pregnancy.

From the beginning there were those who doubted that women could write at all, or that they could write such powerful books, and in 1850 Charlotte wrote a Biographical Notice which asked the public to excuse the novels written by Ellis and Acton Bell (Emily and Anne), on the grounds that due to their rural upbringing they really did not know what they were writing. After her death The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857 by Elizabeth Gaskell, and created almost singlehandedly the myth of three women raised almost like wolves upon the solitary brooding moors, with their doomed brother Branwell (1817-1848) and their tyrannical father. In the Victorian Age Charlotte was reinvented as the archetypal woman, doing her duty nursing her dying siblings and taking care of her father, with her writing being a minor afterthought; and in the 20th century Emily, who always was reclusive, was reinvented as a mystic wandering the moors and getting inspiration from the howling winds. Anne is perhaps the most fortunate sister; she missed out on most of the myth-making, because she (and her works) were mostly overlooked.

This work shows how much of what one thought one knew of the Brontës came less from reality and more from their later myth, and shows that biographies and studies are not written in a vacuum, but in large part are dependent on the views of current culture and on the biographer’s theories of what a given life means. I very much enjoyed this book, and I think anyone who loves any of the books published by the Brontës would enjoy reading this work.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful book that surely requires more study than just reading through it once. Miller writes in an inviting, narrative style, especially in the beginning chapters when she's chronicling a time when Charlotte is still alive and then when her acquaintance Elizabeth Gaskell starts her biography. It's somewhat ironic, though, for this book to feel inviting at all, because one of the things it struggles with is how difficult it is to actually "know" the Bronte sisters. There's just so few surviving primary sources from their youth.

Charlotte will go down as the most well known for all time, because she was actually famous in her own lifetime. The first chapter chronicles her struggle of wanting to stay true to her art and wanting to be in with the literary crowd of her day, which thought JANE EYRE was too coarse for respect. Gaskell, who wanted to carve out a space for women writers as doing "good works" by their fiction while not letting it interfere with their womanly duties, essentially separated the "coarse" Currer Bell from the womanly Charlotte Bronte. There was no denying the artistry of the novels, but they were just too "immoral" for a Victorian audience, so Gaskell had to prove that a)Charlotte's tragic life was responsible for the wrongness, and b)heaven forbid she allowed writing to interfere with the housework! :p

Gaskell's contested (she faced several lawsuits) biography about Charlotte's exaggerated tragic life became the stepping stone for interpretations of the eldest Bronte sister that lasted through the past century and a half. Later critics often viewed her through the popular trends of the time, be they women's suffrage, psychoanalysis, or the melodramatic novel retellings of the mid-20th century. Miller takes her detailed research and analysis up to the late 1990s, about the time that she sat down to write this book, I'd assume. I wonder what she'd make of the latest fictional retellings of Charlotte on paper and in film. The subject is already so riddled with Bronte scholars that the Knapp biography I read at the end of last month, written in 1991, didn't even get a mention.

I suppose I struggle most with Miller when she compares recent "post colonial" interpretations of JANE EYRE's Bertha to the Victorian attitude that tried to pigeonhole female novelists. Victorians were trying to make women one dimensional while modern critics seek to show Bertha with more empathy. I don't think it was Charlotte's intent to show Bertha as an actual person, and no I don't think that takes away from the rest of the novel. Bertha is basically part of the moody backdrop that plagues Jane and Rochester as part of their personal journeys. But I can't blame my contemporaries for wanting to flesh out a more diverse group of people. That wasn't Charlotte's goal, I don't think. She was more interested in the novel as art than the novel as a reflection of broad political and socioeconomic issues. Even SHIRLEY, it turns out, was probably less politically motivated than motivated by the death of Emily. I wrongfully implied in my SHIRLEY review that Charlotte was writing *through* the deaths of her siblings, but actually she stopped in between. And when she came back to the novel it took a different turn, as she focused on the character of Shirley, an independently minded woman like Emily. But in the end, Charlotte created someone to "save" Shirley the way that she couldn't save Emily from death.

When it comes to Emily, Charlotte almost plays the Gaskell role of diluting her sister's memory, though seeing as Emily was a very private person, some of this, particularly the supposed destruction of most of her letters and juvenilia, may have been a welcome development. But Charlotte was also more devout and more concerned with social standing than her sister, which led her to rewrite some of her poetry. Most Emily biographers seem to see her as a mystical, pantheistic force; whether for good or for evil depends on the biases of the critic. Gaskell painted her as more bestial than human as an attempt to separate her from Charlotte, and also because WUTHERING HEIGHTS was so violent. Ironically it got decent reviews in the beginning; perhaps Victorians could let down their guards more with this story, which is more self contained and less socially critical than any of Anne or Charlotte's works. Anne is largely overlooked in this book--she doesn't have as much of a mythology behind her--but I have to wonder if critics were most harsh on THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL, because it very concisely displays real social problems that Victorians wanted to slip under the rug--that of violent alcoholism and women who might feel compelled to leave abusive husbands. Arthur Huntingdon, like Rochester and Heathcliff, has Byronic elements to him, but Anne most clearly points out the realist, negative components of such a man.

For a long time, critics insisted that WUTHERING HEIGHTS was too violent for a woman to have written, and thus the conspiracy theories started, largely propagated by Emily's brother's friends, that Branwell had helped her, or indeed written the entirety of the novel. They even wrote some bad poetry to illustrate the point. :p. Also later people basically made up stories to imply that WUTHERING HEIGHTS was either more autobiographical than it was, or that it was basically "conferred" to Emily by the spirit of the moors, or what have you (actually, fascinatingly, the plot has a lot in common with Byron's fiction). Through as much analysis of primary sources and close accounts as she can gather, Miller debunks these theories, and a lot of the probably fake stories that grew up around the Bronte siblings in order to "prove" the pre-ordained points of whichever critic.

One thing Miller's work proved to me, quite discomfortingly, is how easy it is to focus on half true or falsified accounts of the Brontes, particularly as that's where so much past criticism comes from. I know that I myself have focused on the tragedies in their lives, perhaps at the expense of seeing them as deliberate artists. This seems to be Miller's thesis, too--that they were deliberate artists, responding to a lifetime of reading and learning by crafting well thought out poetry and verse. This stands in contrast to most of the critics that Miller highlights, who more or less see Emily and Charlotte as some form of "possessed" by either good or bad forces, or at the whims of some sort of psychology or social conditioning that was entirely beyond their control. Perhaps only recently have critics dared to judge the novels in the way that the Brontes intended--as works of conscious literature.

I feel like I've rambled more than I've reviewed, but it's a fascinating, thorough book about the various legacies inspired by the Bronte sisters, and about how so much of it really says more about us and our society rather than theirs. Sadly, we only have a finite amount of primary materials to go off of (though it's *possible* that more scraps may emerge...) But Miller gives us the tools to judge the literature and the lives of the Brontes with minimal bias.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years, the myth of the Brontes, three lonely spinsters writing in the middle of the wild Yorkshire moors, surrounded by open heathland, has been perpetuated. Elizabeth Gaskell may be blamed for her initial romanticised biography, but blame must also be shared with early Victorian society. Whilst praising the "fine writing" of 'Jane Eyre', contemporary critic Elizabeth Rigby denounced its protatgonist as "a decidedly vulgar-minded woman" and called the novel "an anti-Christian composition". Oh dear. The three Bronte sisters wrote wild and scandalous novels, particularly Anne's 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'. Someone had to protect and salvage their reputations.

Miller's excellent critical work examines the myth as it has been presented over the years, ranging from Charlotte Bronte's own careful apologies to more recent feminist criticism of the madwoman in the attic. Don't pick up this book expecting a biography of the Brontes. However, do read it for critical analysis of the criticism itself.

[Gregg · Rating 5 out of 5]

From what I can tell, hard evidence of who the Bronte sisters and brother actually were is quite scant; Miller’s book tells the tale of how biographers wove tapestries out of the scraps of material they left behind, often to suit their own agendas. Charlotte Bronte herself had to simultaneously defend and excuse her and her sister Emily’s works, for a variety of reasons. The ur-biography seems to be Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, more an effort to make the case that women could write fiction like the Brontes did without neglecting their domestic duties. And afterwards, biographies catered to Victorian mores, psychological theories, mysticism, pop culture, and a slew of currents the literary and overall world were prey to. Miller deconstructs all this with detail and precision, arguing that perhaps the greatest gift the Brontes left us is that we don’t know all that much about them, but that their works have stood the test of time regardless, so maybe we should stop trying to fit them into our own neat little boxes.

[Faith B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good, thorough biography, I thought. I learned many new things, which is always good. But I did think that she rather harped on how much biographers have misrepresented the Brontes -which is true, of course- and didn't seem to take into account that SHE'S a biographer and could be doing the same thing. And Anne was rather neglected ... Miller remarks on how Anne is so often overlooked, and then promtly overlooks her herself, giving Anne less than a chapter and giving Emily and Charlotte the rest of the book.
Even though I was annoyed by the former item, this seemed to be a clear-sighted book that was well-researched. I liked it very much.
p.s. The chapters are huuugely long (like 9 or 10 chapters in a nearly-300-page book) so don't think "o, after this chapter I'll stop reading", cuz you'll be reading for a loong time. ;)

[Colleen O'Neill Conlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores the nature of biography, and how the biographer's agenda shapes our perception of the subject. The Bronte sisters have been written about so many times since their early deaths in the mid 1800s. Their lives and work have been interpreted and reinterpreted hundreds of times, beginning with Mrs. Gaskell's effort shortly after Charlotte's death. Each new version serves as a corrective, of sorts, for the ones that came before. Part biography, part literary criticism, interesting all the way through.

[Courtney Doss · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bronte sisters (for they are often depicted as a group rather than as individuals) have long captured the hearts - and imaginations- of the general public. As three androgynous pseudonyms whose novels breached the limits of Victorian propriety, they were a novelty to the public. When their true identities became known, three spinster sisters, the interest the public took in them skyrocketed to new heights. The distinct undercurrent of sexual passion in their novels, the topics of alcoholism and violence and impropriety that they addressed unabashedly were all reasons why these sisters were disparaged as "vulgar" and "coarse" in their own time.

To clear their names, to stop the insults that flew even after two of the three sisters died, Charlotte Bronte did what she did best; she created a work of fiction that convinced the world she and her sisters were simple country folk, unused to proper society and so ignorant to the mistakes they had made by addressing topics so taboo for the time. She painted her sisters after their deaths as unlearned, an attempt to "wipe the dust" from their legacies. Her depiction of her sisters, heavily biased and willfully inaccurate, did its work. Her sister Anne, whose novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall offended Victorian sensibilities far more than the others, fell into obscurity - forgiven by the public and forgotten as a consequence. Emily, on the other hand, was depicted as a lonely country woman whose relationship with her alcoholic brother Branwell twisted an otherwise moral and upright mind.

As the only surviving Bronte child, Charlotte herself was left with the task of PR. She made friends with well-known authors of the era, such as William Thackery and Elizabeth Gaskell (the latter would go on to write her most well-known biography), and set about showing herself to be timid and mild - the antithesis of her heavily autobiographical heroine, Jane Eyre. The confusion of identities between the author and her most famous creation was a source of frustration for her, and she did what she had to do to make sure that her legacy was not tainted by what others saw as inappropriate within her plucky heroine.

What Charlotte Bronte perhaps failed to consider was the gossipy and fantastical personality of Elizabeth Gaskell. A married mother of four, Gaskell had a negative view of spinsterhood and a set idea of what constituted femininity. Developing an affection for Charlotte through repeated correspondence (in which Charlotte was playing her docile role), Elizabeth Gaskell could not allow the legacy of her friend to remain tarnished by her radical writing, and so she posthumously set about writing a biography of Charlotte that was so full of fiction as to completely shape the view of the Brontes for generations after.

There were many elements of the Brontes' lives that Gaskell fictionalized, not the least of which was the isolation of their country home. She depicted it as a dark, lonely place lacking in the benefits of culture that others had outside of Haworth. On the contrary, the Brontes had access to many culturally significant works, such as the work of Byron. She depicted Emily Bronte as heavily masculine, a consequence of the "masculine" nature in her work, and Charlotte as a kindly, virginal young woman. She disparaged Charlotte's husband, with whom she'd had a relatively happy marriage (however short lived it was), and made horrible claims against Patrick Bronte, their father. The former was, understandably, not a fan of Gaskell's work, but Patrick Bronte, in a true show of his character, was pleased with the work because it rehabilitated his daughters' images. That was all that mattered to him, despite all of the harm it did to his own character.

From that point on, Gaskell's biography would serve as a launching point for other biographers of the Brontes. Her use of correspondence between Charlotte and her friends provided first person accounts of Charlotte's life, and people ate it up. However, Gaskell knew what she was doing. Details of Charlotte's life that didn't fit the narrative Gaskell preferred were ignored, including Charlotte's inappropriate love for her married professor, Constantin Heger.

The letters sent by Charlotte Bronte to Heger, in which she confesses her love, were released to the public in 1913, and so the image of the famous author once again underwent a change. This fact and many more contributed to the evolving image of the Bronte sisters over the generations, and Lucasta Miller expertly traces the popular impression of the sisters through the centuries, clearing up all of the fictionalized element along the way.

I adored this book. I found myself highlighting and annotating almost every page, thrilled to find information that I had never heard before and fascinated to find information on the character of not only the Bronte sisters themselves, but many of the people in their lives. As an influential trio of sisters, the Brontes have long held the fascination of the general public and it was so interesting to see the way that fact gave way to fiction again and again throughout the years. The Brontes and their fiction represent something different to each of us, because we place a piece of ourselves into their stories. Lucasta Miller peels back the layers, showing us what is underneath. And while the information we do have is hardly as much as we would wish, it provides an interesting picture of these sisters who so changed the world with their prose.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and detailed account of how the personal Bronte myths have often detracted or apologized for the works themselves. Despite attempts and wishes to the contrary, they were not lonely uneducated victimized doomed mystics but scholarly and skilled writers who produced masterworks.