The Brontës

by Juliet Barker

First published 1994

Amazon

4.6(421)

Juliet Barker’s collective biography follows Patrick Brontë and his children from their Yorkshire childhoods through the extraordinary literary careers of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Drawing on manuscripts, letters, diaries and local records, Barker reconstructs daily life at Haworth, the siblings’ elaborate imaginary worlds, their attempts to earn a living through teaching, governess work and art, and the difficult path from private writing to publication under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

The book also re-examines the family legends that accumulated after their deaths. Patrick emerges as more engaged and affectionate than the forbidding patriarch of earlier biographies, while Branwell’s ambitions, failures and addictions are placed in fuller context. Barker follows the creation of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall alongside illness, bereavement and the pressures of Victorian literary life, producing a detailed portrait of the Brontës as a family rather than a collection of myths.