{"product_id":"the-bront-myth","title":"The Bront Myth","description":"\u003cp\u003eSince 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44986229391413,"sku":"ByrdShop_0375412778","price":27.78,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780375412776.jpg?v=1770893336","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-bront-myth","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}