Customer Reviews

The Bronte Myth

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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.

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

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.

Lucasta Miller sums up her addition to the mountains of Bronte materials as a "metabiography." What she does here, actually, is deconstruct the layers of myth and mystery surrounding the three Bronte sisters, starting with Elizabeth Gaskell's 1857 "Life of Charlotte Bronte." Miller's stated intent to to refocus readers' attention on the social, political and literary influences on the three authors (actually only two, as Anne -- undeservingly -- receives little attention here). Miller also makes a convincing case as to how Charlotte and Emily contributed knowingly to the enduring myths about their lonely, provincial childhood, famously full of suffering, illness and death. That the sisters were complicit in creating their own mythos is entirely convincing and makes for a fascinating read. Miller focuses in on portraits of the sisters in biography, fiction, film and television, analyzing an amazing array of sources' skews on the Bronte legacy. Familiarity with the Bronte oevre is helpful to fully enjoying this iconoclastic look at the three weird sisters and the creative output they have inspired.

This book turns out to be the Holy Grail when it comes to the Brontes. The writer goes beyond the misty moors and sheds a bit of light into the reality of the Brontes. It's refreshing and new and the writer leads you to other books, recently published, that open an entire new view of the Brontes. This is a wonderful book.

The Bronte myth consists of preconcieved ideas of the Bronte family, wherein Elizabeth Gaskell's boigraphy of Charlotte's life is somewhat erroneous. She portrays the Bronte family as brooding and depressed, their father as a villian. She implies they have a secluded childhood, and Charlotte is basically sexless and pious. The myth of the Bronte family has survived down to our day.
I did enjoy the book, reading about the Bronte's early life, the difference between who they truly were, and what the preconcieved notion of them has been. My great fault with the book is that while Charlotte, the Bronte who perhaps the most is known about, is discussed at length, we hear less of the other sisters, though a large portion is devoted to the elusive Emily. I have always wished to know more about the lesser known, seemingly forgotten Bronte, Anne, but in this book she is as overshadowed by her sisters as she has been these past 150+ years. And in that way I feel as if I know as little about Anne as I did before reading this book. It makes me seem as though we are all content to pass over and not acknowledge this very talented woman from a very talented family.

Will the real Bronte sisters please stand up.

A biographer has to put something of himself into the book he writes. We see in people a reflection of ourselves, of our family, of the people we know. In the case of the Bronte's they were doing things that young ladies simply didn't do, like write books, and particularily they didn't write books like these. After all, the books that these ladies wrote talked about, dare I say it, yes, I will, sex.

This book, called a metabiography is an analysis of the biographies of the Bronte's. The first biography, written by Elizabeth Gaskell two years after Charlotte's death spun the sisters into picturesque myth -- family tragedies, Yorkshire moor, and all. All families have tragedies particularily in a time when so little was known about medicine. And the image you can write of the moor is different than the land really looks.

In attempting to do away with the myth to get to the women underneath, this book takes an entirely new approach to the Bronte's and to biographies in general.

It is very hard to find new information about the Bronte sisters, everything that can already be said about them has. For years they have been labeled as feminists, or sad lonely spinsters, and there works have been deconstructed and over analyzed until you just become sick of hearing about them. I never do, of course, ever since I read Jane Eyre as a girl I have been intrigued by the brilliant voice that could create such interesting and lovable characters like Jane and Mr. Rochester. I personally love reading books about the Brontes, I think it is facinating reading how others interpret them, their work, and their relationships with each other and their father and brother. They do create the perfect gothic picture of a tragic family, alone on the moors, the mother dead, two older sisters also gone, and eccentric father and tragic older brother. It isn't hard to imagine why they have become such a myth and a force of fiction. Lucasta Miller does an excellent job trying to piece together their lives and deconstruct the forces behind their works. I enjoyed reading her theories and I loved how she mixed a bit of biography, myth and intrepretation of their novels all into one very enjoyable read. She did spend most of the novel discussing Charlotte, but I thought that she did the best job she could trying to include Emily and Anne with what little information is available on them. Emily will always be such a recluse, unobtaniable figure in literary history. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a little more information about the Brontes and how they affected writers and other novels since.

Lucasta Miller's THE BRONTE MYTH appeared earlier this year but deserves ongoing mention as an excellent addition to the literature on the Brontes. There've already been numerous books on the topic of each Bronte family member: so why the need for yet another? Lucasta Miller goes a step further in her coverage, showing how the Brontes became cultural symbols as their novels were published, and providing insights into how this happened. Recommended for any college-level literary collection.

I needed this book for an upper-level university course on the Bronte sisters. It is adequately well-written, and my passion for the subject has kept me intrigued enough to finish it (as well as the requirement for class, of course!). Miller's writing style, however, is just a bit annoying--the tone is rather informal, treading somewhere between the "novellized history" of Irving Stone, and the usual voice found in English texts. I found that she carries off neither effectively, though if she had just chosen one or the other she surely would have been able to.

Definitely a worthwhile read overall, though--very insightful for anyone who has an interest in the Brontes.