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  • The Brontë Myth
  • Speer Morgan
The Brontë Myth by Lucasta MillerKnopf, 2004, 351 pp., $26.95

Many readers are acquainted with the writings of the Brontës. Jane Eyre, by eldest sister Charlotte, and Wuthering Heights, by Emily, are important novels in the English literary canon, and Anne's The Tenant of Wilfell Hall is a more-than-respectable novel of its time. All three sisters, as well as their brother, Branwell, also wrote poetry. Their father outlived his children, but he did live to see—to his dismay—the beginning of the Brontë legend that reigned supreme for decades:

They lived in a lonely parsonage on the barren Yorkshire moors, three sisters, surrounded by little but the howling wind and distant, uncouth, misanthropic neighbors. Cut off from normal cultural resources, their writing sprang from the deprivation and savagery of their environment. Their brother was violent and insane and their father a doomed, haunted figure. The passion and suffering in their writing was merely their naïve account of the only world they knew.

What is wrong with this picture?

The question, as Lucasta Miller points out in her metabiography of the Brontës, should be what is right about it. Haworth was not a weirdly isolated parsonage but a typical provincial town, with some eleven grocers, three butchers and a watchmaker. The Brontë children's clergyman father was anything but a gloomy figure. He allowed his girls, even as young children, a level of freedom in reading that was extraordinary for their time, giving them free access not just to the novels in his library but also to literary journals such as Blackwood's Magazine. All the Brontë siblings were lovers of Romantic literature, and they created an astonishing number of stories and plays, which they transcribed into tiny [End Page 181] booklets. The Brontë juvenilia, some of which somehow survived, suggests in places joyous creativity and high spirits among the Brontë siblings.

To uncover the source of the myth, Miller first describes the controversy that Jane Eyre created in its day. Published under the name "Currer Bell," who was assumed by many reviewers to be a man, the novel was for many a shocking and fascinating view into the psychology and passion of a poor governess thwarted by the restrictions of her time. As it became apparent that Jane Eyre's author was a woman, the tide of opinion turned decisively against the book. It was condemned as being "coarse" and "anti-Christian," making a heroine of "an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit." Emily's Wuthering Heights was thought to be even more disgusting, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall "revolting."

Lucasta Miller believes that the legend of the Brontës had its source in a successful attempt by the genteel novelist Elizabeth Gaskell to rescue Charlotte from the ignominy of being a female rebel. Gaskell was fascinated by Charlotte's writing but agreed with the consensus of the time that she went overboard. Gaskell sought out Charlotte's friendship and in her letters to friends gossiped at length about her relationship with the odd provincial responsible for such a cause célèbre. Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, published in 1857, depicted Charlotte as martyred by a barbaric existence yet still managing to accomplish her humble, womanly, domestic duties. It characterized her as having no clue about the implications of her own writing.

With singular purpose, the novelist/biographer Gaskell ignored much of what she learned about Charlotte and the Brontë family. She depicted Charlotte's father, Patrick, who had fully cooperated with the project, as a villain. She changed dates and details to make Branwell the source of Charlotte's knowledge about a stormy affair, rather than Charlotte's own experience with a teacher of hers during a year of studying in Belgium.

There is little in Miller's book that would surprise a Brontë scholar. Gaskell's biography was a best-seller that was highly influential in its time, but for serious later readers of the Brontës, it was obviously full of exaggerations and mistakes. Miller does a wonderful job, however, of synthesizing more recent, better knowledge of the Brontës...

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