A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Bronte - Hardcover

Frank, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395425085 ISBN 13: 9780395425084

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1990

Synopsis

Describes the complex personality, family life, and literary works of Emily Bronte, unveiling the myths that have surrounded her, the patterns in her life and work, and her motivations

About this title

About the Author:

Born and educated in America, Katherine Frank is the author of several acclaimed biographies, including those of Lucie Duff Gordon, Emily Bronte, Mary Kingsley, and Indira Gandhi. She lives in England.

From Publishers Weekly:

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, "a saga of . . . transcendent, death-defying love," is also "a book profoundly concerned with food and hunger and starvation," observes Frank. Bronte's oft-celebrated mystical temperament, in Frank's persuasive diagnosis, was a manifestation of anorexia nervosa, as evidenced by her refusal to eat, her extreme slenderness, her retreat into an interior fantasy world. In an extraordinary, remarkably intimate biography that is as emotionally charged as a Bronte novel, Frank ( A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley ) dismantles the conventional, rhapsodic family story of the storm-tossed Brontes. She deftly limns Emily's older sister, Charlotte, wracked by "religious depressions"; her brother, Branwell, dosing himself with laudanum; and Anne, meekly reconciled to "her assigned family role as the insignificant little sister." Emily Bronte emerges as a "hunger artist" who sustained a fragile illusion of control through self-denial, but also as a woman of courage and inflexible will, indifferent to the world's opinions. Illustrated.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0395425085
• ISBN 13: 9780395425084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 302