The Bronte Myth [Paperback]

Lucasta Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 4, 2005

In a brilliant combination of biography, literary criticism, and history, The Bronté Myth shows how Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronté became cultural icons whose ever-changing reputations reflected the obsessions of various eras.

When literary London learned that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights had been written by young rural spinsters, the Brontés instantly became as famous as their shockingly passionate books. Soon after their deaths, their first biographer spun the sisters into a picturesque myth of family tragedies and Yorkshire moors. Ever since, these enigmatic figures have tempted generations of readers–Victorian, Freudian, feminist–to reinterpret them, casting them as everything from domestic saints to sex-starved hysterics. In her bewitching “metabiography,” Lucasta Miller follows the twists and turns of the phenomenon of Bront-mania and rescues these three fiercely original geniuses from the distortions of legend.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Even in their lifetimes, the Bronte sisters—Charlotte, Emily and Anne—were remarkable figures whose literary reputations were often shrouded in a web of myth and lies that to some degree still endures. In this volume, Miller, a literary critic and former deputy literary editor of The Independent, presents a markedly intelligent "metabiography" that sorts through these half-truths to give a fresh, original portrait of three exceptional writers. Celebrated by some of their 19th century readers as literary heroes and castigated by others as reckless and immoral, the Brontes defied conventions even as they tried to live within them: "revolutionizing the imaginative presentation of women’s inner lives" even as they cultivated the social persona of "the modest spinster daughter." Miller traces the trajectory of their careers, particularly Charlotte’s, from their childhood games to the stunning success of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Drawing on a wealth of letters and scholarly works, Miller succeeds in carefully revealing how the rumors that portrayed the Brontes as gothic creatures, saints and martyrs became more important than the women’s novels, "covering and supplanting," as Henry James said, "their matter, their spirit, their style, their talent, their taste." Miller touches on everyone from Elizabeth Gaskell, whose famous Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) "marked the birth of the Brontes as cultural icons," to Ted Hughes, and thus illuminates not only the lives of the sisters, but the significance and import of their work. Ultimately, such literary reclamation is what Miller is after: to clear up the clutter of history, to bring to light the genius and artistry of the novels and to let the Brontes speak for themselves. 
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Although a collaborative first book of poems sold only two copies, the Brontë sisters were in their own time subject to the kind of cult fascination that persists today, with thousands of pilgrims journeying every year to the Brontë home, in Yorkshire. Miller's ingenious book traces this fascination, beginning with Mrs. Gaskell's famous 1857 biography, which sought to excuse the "coarseness" of novels like "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" by embellishing details of the authors' gothically miserable childhood. Miller provides a corrective—a biography of a biography—showing how successive generations, including Stracheyan, Freudian, feminist, and poststructural critics, remolded the Brontës to fit their own agendas. Like Mrs. Gaskell's, these treatments often focussed more on the authors' lives than on their work, in spite of Charlotte's plea: "I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (January 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400078350
• ISBN-13: 978-1400078356
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #733,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Brontes deconstructed, April 28, 2004

By 

JLind555 - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Brontė Myth (Hardcover)

When I was 12 years old I discovered the Bronte sisters through "Jane Eyre" (falling hopelessly in love with Mr. Rochester in the process). Even in their own lifetime, the Brontes were a source of fascination and speculation. Lucasta Miller does a very good job of portraying the myths that grew up around the three sisters, and showing us the reality behind the legends.

To an extent, the myths were perpetrated by the Brontes themselves, as a defense against the public reaction to their extraordinary books. Already in 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell's "Life of Charlotte Bronte" told the public about the sisters' lives, much as Charlotte herself wanted it presented. "Jane Eyre" was a shocking book for its time; women weren't supposed to have such strong sexual feelings, let alone write about them. Charlotte developed, and helped perpetrate the myth of the sisters as quiet, mousy types, martyrs to duty and family, beset by tragedy at every turn. Charlotte was not only a great writer; she was a master at presenting herself the way she wanted others to see her.

I have a real problem with this books lack of proportionate attention given to the two younger sisters. Miller's assessment of Emily is much briefer than the space she gives to Charlotte, and about Anne she says almost nothing at all. Anne has always been the "forgotten Bronte"; most people who have grown up with "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" have never read anything Anne wrote. But "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" is every bit as compelling as the books of her better known sisters, and gives evidence that behind the quiet face she showed to the world, Anne may have been every bit as much a strong personality as Jane and Emily.

Generally, Miller is a strong biographer and shows us the Bronte sisters as they probably really were: vibrant individuals living full, all-too-short lives. The sisters she presents here are women who were really capable of writing the turbulently emotional, romantic novels that have endured as classics of English literature.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The real Brontes., January 25, 2005

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Brontė Myth (Hardcover)

The Brontes defied Victorian conventions, which is what makes them such fascinating biographical subjects. For every reader of JANE EYRE or WUTHERING HEIGHTS, it seems as though there are hundreds of other readers more interested in the biographical details of the Brontes' lives. Virginia Woolf said that "a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand" (p. 121). In her "metabiography" (p. xii) of Charlotte, Emily, and to a lesser extent, Anne Bronte--collectively known as "the Bronte sisters," literary critic, Lucasta Miller, cuts through layers of myth that add up to a thousand different Brontes, to reveal the real artistic fire central to these three unconventional women. From Elizabeth Gaskell's 1857 LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE, portraying her subject as a "quiet and trembling creature, reared in total seclusion, a martyr to duty, and a model of Victorian femininity" (p. 4), to novelists, Freudian psychobiographers, filmmakers, poets (like Ted Hughes, who called them "three weird sisters"), and feminists, all of whom have portrayed the Brontes as "three lonely sisters playing out their tragic destiny on top of a windswept moor with a mad misanthrope father and doomed brother" (p. 62), Miller surveys more than a hundred years of fascinating Bronte mania, to examine the real literary value of reading the Brontes.

G. Merritt

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First rate debunking of the mythmakers, November 18, 2004

By 

Jane Greensmith (Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Brontė Myth (Hardcover)

I got this book expecting it to be a biography of the family, and it turned out to be more a review of how and why biographers have distorted who Charlotte and Emily Bronte were and what they achieved as writers. Lucasta Miller's main point in the book is that the Brontes have really been short-changed as authors. I suppose she doesn't really discuss Anne Bronte because she doesn't put her work on the same level as the others and Anne hasn't become a cult figure in the same way CB and EB have.

I've always counted JE and WH as among my favorite books, and it was so gratifying to have them vindicated as the great books they truly are instead of being castigated for not fitting into someone else's expectations of what they should be.