The Bronts - Softcover

Juliet Barker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349122423 ISBN 13: 9780349122427

Publisher: Abacus, 2010

Synopsis

The story of the tragic Bronte family is familiar to everyone: we all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken, drug-addicted wastrel of a brother, wild romantic Emily, unrequited Anne and 'poor Charlotte'. Or do we? These stereotypes of the popular imagination are precisely that - imaginary - created by amateur biographers from Mrs Gaskell onwards who were primarily novelists, and were attracted by the tale of an apparently doomed family of genius. Juliet Barker's landmark book was the first definitive history of the Brontes. It demolishes myths, yet provides startling new information that is just as compelling - but true. Based on first-hand research among all the Bronte manuscripts, many so tiny they can only be read by magnifying glass, and among contemporary historical documents never before used by Bronte biographers, this book is both scholarly and compulsively readable. THE BRONTES is a revolutionary picture of the world's favourite literary family. 'As a work of scholarship it is briliant ...For those with a passion for the Brontes, or for Victoriana, or for sheer wealth of historical minutiae, it is a stupendous read' INDPENDENT ON SUNDAY

About this title

About the Author

Juliet Barker is a distinguished biographer and a medievalist and scholar. She is both a bestselling historian and a critically acclaimed expert on the Brontes.

From Booklist

Neither Charlotte, Emily, Anne, nor Branwell Brontelived past the age of 38, yet they left an impression on English literature that has fully occupied biographers, many of whom have portrayed the Brontes as doomed romantics, held captive for all of their adult years by a cruel, widowed curate father in the wasteland of the Yorkshire moors. But Barker, a past curator of the BronteParsonage Museum, tells a different tale with admirable objectivity; her extensively documented alternative view is based on new material, including family letters. Convincingly, she portrays Haworth, the town where the Brontes passed their lives, not as the traditional barrens, but as a fairly active agricultural and mercantile locale, subject to clerical, political, and economic struggles. (Her accounts of bad sanitary conditions and rife disease are especially compelling.) Patrick Bronte, in her perspective, emerges as an impressively rational and steadfastly affectionate father, not the egregiously high-minded belligerent of lore. As for the four siblings, Barker takes care not to presume or sentimentalize. She methodically outlines Branwell's notorious decline into drug and alcohol addiction, suggesting its consequences for other family members; offers Anne, the least appreciated of the writers, as, in some respects, the most adventurous in her pursuit of realism; and considers Charlotte critically yet sympathetically as an imperious, often manipulative literary majordomo whose unrequited love for her Belgian language teacher ran parallel in its self-destructive energy to her brother's dangerous liaison with an opportunistic married woman. Despite the book's saturation in period detail, the cumulative effect of Barker's 800-odd pages is oddly contemporary: a legendary literary quartet steps out of the storybooks with a distinctly welcome, unemotional clarity. Molly McQuade

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0349122423
• ISBN 13: 9780349122427
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2