The Oxford Companion to the Brontes (review)

Any Brontë scholar will find The Oxford Companion to the Brontës indispensable. It combines detailed, ground-level information about specific topics such as Charlotte Brontë's revisions of Villette (1853)—including the location of the original fair copy manuscript and proofs of the first edition (the British and Sterling Libraries respectively)—with overviews of broad topics, such as the position of women in the nineteenth century. Entries range in length from a short paragraph to several pages of substantive material. While it is possible that someone might search this weighty volume in vain for an obscure topic, I found everything I could imagine, and more. Pugilism, for instance, turns out to have been one of Branwell Brontë's avid interests, one that Charlotte temporarily shared during their joint authorship of the Glass Town saga. On a more serious note, the volume provides helpful references to writers who influenced the Brontës, personal acquaintances, significant locations, classical mythology, their financial status, and a host of other relevant information. One can learn about the training in piano, flute, and organ that shaped their use of music in fiction and poetry. The volume also orients the reader to the Brontës' writing, which is treated in entries on individual works with sections on composition, manuscripts and their locations, plot summaries, public reception, and brief biographies. Many other topics, such as "Letters by the Brontë Family," "Books Read by the Brontës," "Natural History and the Brontës," and "Portraits by the Brontës," also rate extended treatment. Coming very close to their goal of comprehensiveness, the editors have performed an enormous service for scholars, teachers, and readers.

The Oxford Companion is well designed for ease of use. In addition to its alphabetical organization, it groups individual entries in a "Classified Contents List" by topic. A reader interested in the Brontës' travel can quickly ascertain the places they visited that are treated in this companion. It also includes a chronology of the Brontës' lives and works in relation to literary and historical events; maps of England, Ireland, and Angria; and a dictionary of dialect and obsolete words. A hefty 586 pages, the volume is nevertheless efficient, covering a great deal of ground in a straightforward and useful way.

Because of its wealth of concrete information, The Oxford Companion might be subtitled "Demythologizing the Brontës." The discussion of Haworth parish and the parsonage reminds the reader of the actual life of the area as well as its imaginative transformation at the hands of the Brontës: local industry, schools, churches and denominations, architecture, mortality rates, and environmental pollution are all covered in a two- page entry, locating the family in a material world enmeshed in social issues. The Oxford Companion also reassesses the stereotypes of individual family members. A poet as well as a local activist engaged in the issues of his day, Patrick Brontë emerges as a significant intellectual influence on his children, especially Charlotte and Anne. The revisionist account of Branwell is particularly striking, revealing him as a dedicated, ambitious writer striving to reach beyond local outlets and break into the national scene, encouraged at least in part by favorable attention from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The juvenilia is treated extensively and with precision, benefiting from editor Christine Alexander's authoritative knowledge of the Brontës' early writing. This entry stresses the distinctive talents and contributions of each sibling; the "rich intertextuality" of the stories, which draw on Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Samuel Johnson, as well as the fertile imaginations of their writers; and Branwell's and Charlotte's involvement in these productions well into adulthood, which calls into question the label of "juvenilia" and its implication of aesthetic immaturity. This entry, one of the most interesting in the volume, stresses the privacy in which the sagas were written; without the expectation of adult judgment, the sagas allowed "the uninhibited development of the self...