Product Description

Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Bronte 'biography' appearing. These range from pious accounts in Victorian conduct books to Freudian psychobiographies, from plays, films and ballets to tourist brochures and images on tea-towels, from sensation-seeking penny-a-liners to meticulous works of sober scholarship. Each generation has rewritten the Brontes to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. "The Bronte Myth" gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture and Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontes themselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67172 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 334 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Bronte Myth traces the various ways the Brontes have been interpreted by an ever-increasing and increasingly dotty fanbase from their own lifetimes through the end of the 19th and into the 20th century. The book treats first Charlotte then Emily, leaving Anne pretty much out of the picture, since (Miller argues) she has "never taken on the mythic stature of her sisters in her own right", which is hard luck for any dedicated Anne-fans; but Miller certainly finds many absorbing things to say about the other two sisters.

The point of the study is to examine the way interpretations of these two women have shifted so kaleidoscopically over the last century-and-a-half. Charlotte is seen in Gaskell's Life as "paragon of womanhood", then, as the century ends and the vogue for self-improvement takes hold, as a self-taught writer who had risen from obscurity. The 20th century brought the revelation of her thwarted passion for a Belgian schoolteacher, and she became an embodiment of smouldering unfulfilled sexual intensity. Emily, more neglected earlier on, came into her own in the latter part of the last century, revered as "the mystic of the moors". Both women of course were icons of the feminist literary movement in the 1960s, and their popularity continues today in the academy; but they are loved outside the university as well, appealing (says Miller) particularly to shy, lonely, bookish children.

Miller skilfully weaves a narrative of the developing Bronte myth, paralleling it with the development of the art of biography itself, allowing the two to illuminate one another. Sometimes, reading through the trivia (Bronte chocolate and biscuits, D-grade critical studies and so on) the reader might wonder if the subject really merits such in-depth treatment. But in tracing this story, Miller has good points to make about the way a biography is always, to one degree or another, a fiction, reflecting the concerns of the age in which it is produced. For anybody interested in the Brontes, or interested in what Virginia Woolf called the "bastard, impure art of biography" there is a great deal here of interest. --Adam Roberts

From the Publisher
A fascinating and wonderfully readable deconstruction of the countless myths that have grown up around the Brontës.

About the Author
Lucasta Miller read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She has published research on Milton and worked as a literary journalist, reviewing for, among others, The Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the New Statesman, the TLS, the Economist and the Independent, of which she was Deputy Literary Editor. She is married to the tenor Ian Bostridge and lives in London. This is her first book.

Customer Reviews

Sisters are doin' it for themselves
This book is for those who have been seduced by Gaskell's image of a miserable Charlotte Bronte shuffling along the cobbled streets in her clogs, and have found it difficult to reconcile this idea with the sensuality of her novels. Lucasta Miller strips away nearly 150 years of myth and downright nonsense and describes with wit and lucidity how the sisters' reputations have fallen victim to the attitudes and interpretations of successive generations.

More than just another book about the Brontes, this work examines the art of biography and the changing trends in this genre. As with many other writers, the sisters have become public property and, as such, there is a tendency for us to become focussed on the authors rather than their literary canon. Lucasta Miller urges us to return to the novels in order to learn about these enigmatic women, and that is exactly what I intend to do.

An excellent, unusual examination of the Bronte myth
The previous review is too good to improve on, but I would like to say that this is one of the best biographies I've read since Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task. The biography of biographies might seem arid and over-scholarly to the general reader but this is witty, shrewd, unsnobbish and full of insight. Hugely impressive and enjoyable.

The Brontes: Fact or Fiction?
Our expectation of books about the Brontes is that they will be biographies, literary studies or contributions to the Haworth heritage industry. The Bronte Myth is none of these, but offers a subtle and challenging exploration of the territory that lies between. As soon as the sisters first published (under their Bell pseudonyms), the speculation began about who they were, initially a simple matter of identity and gender, but very soon creating myths about their nature and significance. Emily and Anne being almost instantly removed from the scene, the first creators of the Bronte Myth were Charlotte herself and, after her death, her biographer Mrs. Gaskell. A century and a half later, the sisters have been re-created to suit successive generations and philosophies and the myth renews itself in film, popular song, coach trips, tea rooms and country biscuits. This powerful and changing myth is explored with scholarship and wit by Lucasta Miller whose range of reference is indicated by 40 pages of notes (to 250 pages of text), largely source acknowledgements. Countless biographies (from the astute to the absurd) are examined with forbearance and/or irony and popular culture is not neglected. It's refreshing to find a scholarly account giving mentions to Lip Service's disingenuous Bronte parody, Withering Looks, and the Bronte Society's canine look-alike competition (post-modernist irony, surely?). Inferences and connections are unfailingly revealing, with a shrewd examination of Stella Gibbons' comic masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm, as a reaction to 1920s passionate nature myths of Emily Bronte, and the bold decision to finish the book with the effect of the Bronte myth on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, 'in the public mind...the Cathy and Heathcliff of their generation'. I missed a comment on James Kirkups witty and apposite poem, A Visit to Bronteland', but otherwise the range of cultural reference is overwhelming. Not that 'overwhelming' is a word that can be readily applied to a book that makes the academic accessible to the general reder. For a study that depends largely on a fascinatng deconstruction of Gaskell's 1857 biography, it is also impressively up-to-date, incorporating Shared Experience's 1997/99 theatre version of Jane Eyre (though I cannot share Miller's enthusiasm for the production) and even a passing reference to Michael Berkeley's 2000 opera which similarly finds some identification between Jane and the first Mrs. Rochester. A pity that the still-underrrated Anne Bronte gets so little of Lucasta Miller's attention, but the book is about the Bronte Myth and in that myth Anne is always the sister in the kitchen making the tea.