The Bront Myth

About this book

Since 1857 hardly a year has gone by without a book or play or monograph or film about the Bronts. Each generation has reimagined Charlotte Emily and Anne in ways that reflect changing visionsof the role of the woman writer or of sexuality or of the very concept of personality. Charlotte Bront has been seen as domestic saint as sex-starved hysteric as ambitious literary careerist. Her sister Emily has been furnished with apocryphal lovers of both sexes; has even been denied the authorship of Wuthering Heights by conspiracy theorists who attribute it to her brother Branwell. Now Lucasta Miller in The Bront Myth shows us how the Bronts became cultural symbols almost as soon as their novels were published; how they became notorious even before the veil dropped from their carefully chosen pseudonyms as Charlottes Jane Eyre and Emilys Wuthering Heights appearing out of nowhere instantly fascinated inspired and scandalized English readers. The subsequent discovery that Currer Ellis and Acton Bell were three youngish spinsters parsons daughtersliving rural lives of utmost propriety made interest in the sisters obsessive. Add a supposedly ferocious father and untimely death to say nothing of the Victorian penchant for seeing noble sacrifice in every possible situation and the production of legends multiplied. Lucasta Miller provides fascinating insight into the manufacture of cultural myth and how it can distort our memory of the artist even as it obscures the art. She traces the reinterpretations indeed re-creations of the Bronts from Charlottes own efforts to soften her dead sisters reputations and Mrs. Gaskells classic portrait of the artists as exemplary Christian ladies to the fashionably Freudian psychobiographies of the 1920s and 30s from counterfeit memorabilia and the promotion of literary tourism to Hollywood representations of gloomy heroines on savage windswept moors. She rescues the Bronts from their admirers and attackers giving us back three vivid women who with little formal education were writing in the days when few women dared to try: geniuses and sisters who in the words of a household witness in the late 1850s were as cheerful and full of spirits as possible.... full of fun and merriment. From the Trade Paperback edition.