The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller
823.8 Bronte
Miller provides a fascinating discussion of the hundreds of biographies, novels, plays, and movies about Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) quickly provoked scandal and critical condemnation in Victorian England. When Charlotte sent some poems to Poet Laureate Robert Southey a few years earlier, he responded that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be.” The novels were published under male pseudonyms, but then rumors revealed that the authors were women, who dared to be more than housewives, wrote about female sexual desires, and focused on coarse, revengeful men such as Heathcliff. To counteract this notoriety, Charlotte’s first biographer, her friend Ellen Nussey, portrayed Charlotte and her sisters as modest, unassuming Christian women content to be housekeepers for their clergyman father and totally unlike the characters they wrote about. The sisters all died early deaths: Emily in 1848 at the age of thirty, Anne in 1849 at the age of twenty-nine, and Charlotte in 1855 at the age of thirty-nine; and there was a paucity of other biographical information collected during early decades before they were recognized as major authors. Miller discusses the myths created during subsequent decades by authors who assumed the poems and novels reflected the sisters’ own experiences or who went off the deep end in attempted psychoanalysis or were swayed by conventional, feminist, or other agendas. Except for recent works using a more careful historical approach, most of the earlier biographies are unreliable.
