The Brontë story has always been riddled with myths. Charlotte herself started the process in an attempt to explain why her sisters had written novels which had both shocked and titillated the literary critics. Mrs Gaskell ably extended this argument to Charlotte herself, producing in her Life of Charlotte Brontë a persuasive and powerful polemic which has never been seriously challenged. Instead of being writers of ‘naughty books’, who revelled in vulgarity and brutality, the Brontës thus became graduates of the school of adversity, writing in all innocence about the barbarous society in
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