The trio had much going against them: Branwell, the designated family genius, was educated in the classics by his father, and the money was found to send him to London to pursue his grand dreams of becoming an artist, but his sisters, in keeping with their genteelly impoverished lot, were forced to find humble employment as governesses and teachers. Yet their legacy is incomparable in the history of writer-siblings both for the degree of individual talent and for the triumph of imaginative vision over inhospitable circumstance that they personify. None of them lived to 40: Emily and Anne died of consumption within five months of each other, the one at 30 and the other at 29 (Branwell died three months before Emily, at the age of 31), and Charlotte, the only one of the sisters to marry, was in the early months of pregnancy at the time of her death just short of 39. 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.HAS there ever been a background more marked by personal tragedy and literary ill omen than the one that produced the Bronte sisters? Charlotte, Emily and Anne: there was less than four years between them (their brother, Branwell, who dissipated his talents in drink and drugs, came between Charlotte and Emily), and it is tempting to think of the three, radically different as their personalities were, as linked to one another like a chain of paper-doll cutouts. Lucasta Miller reveals where this image came from and how it took such a hold on the popular imagination.Įach 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.

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. Knopf publishers, New York hardbound in chocolate boards with silver lettering along spine very good condition with unmarked pages dust jacket very good.įollowing 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. 2003 'First American Edition' stated Alfred A.

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller