The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte: The Secrets of a Mysterious Family : A Novel [Hardcover]

James Tully (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1999

Using fiction to explore further his investigation into the Brontes' lives, noted true crime author James Tully creates a murder mystery darker than anything produced by their imaginations and reveals a hidden side to their literary myth. Told through the Parsonage maid, Martha Brown, The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte penetrates the claustrophobic world where the Bronte sisters wrote their stories of tumultuous passions and twisted love. Were their tragically early deaths merely the result of illness, or are there telltale clues of poisoning in their correspondence and the doctors' reports? What was Branwell's true role in the writing of Wuthering Heights? Why are Charlotte's letters about her sisters' deaths so strangely inconsistent with all the other facts we have?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"My name is Martha Brown, and for over 20 years I was servant to the Bront? family at Haworth Parsonage." So begins a deposition in this provocative if melodramatic novel by crime writer Tully (Prisoner 1167: The Madman Who Was Jack the Ripper). The story begins in modern times when solicitor Charles Coutts discovers Brown's deposition hidden in his 200-year-old law firm's antique-filled attic in Yorkshire. Coutts becomes fascinated by Brown's claim that the Bront?s were likely murdered and that elder sister Charlotte both knew and approved of Anne's death. To propel this doubtful scenario, Tully weaves together historical research and speculation to produce a revisionist, sinister picture of the Bront? clan. The chief villain here is not the accepted cause of fatalityAthe ravages of advanced tuberculosisAbut their father's associate, Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls. Tully posits that Nicholls had a Svengali-like hold on the sisters, which likely inspired the creation of their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. A decade after the publications of their books, all three sisters are dead (along with their brother, Branwell, and their father) and Brown's detailed plot involves manipulative envy, property acquisition and poison. Brown's deposition falters stylistically in that it neither reconstructs Victorian language nor produces a modern equivalent, but the mystery it unravels will intrigue or vex readers familiar with the Bront? legacy. Coutts's comments suggest that the "authorized" version of this legacy is romanticized and mythic, a pure pastoral tale of three brilliant sisters languishing in the English countryside. Instead, Tully sees plagiarism, sexual indiscretions and a murder plot alongside religious fervor and burning literary ambitions. Just as interesting are the harsh details of servant Brown's daily struggles and her fly-on-the-wall perspective.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Though much study has been devoted to the Brontesisters and their esteemed body of literature, surprisingly scant attention has been paid to the mysterious circumstances surrounding their deaths. The strange truth is that Emily, Anne, and Branwell, their brother, died months apart, with Charlotte expiring just six years later; all were on the cusp of the thirties when they died, and all died of nebulous causes. Intrigued by this bizarre chronology of misfortunes, true-crime writer Tully performs his own investigation and emerges with a chilling theory. Weaving together doctors' reports, personal correspondence, and circumstantial evidence, Tully concludes that the Brontesiblings were poisoned by Mr. Bronte's charismatic assistant, the Reverend Nicholls. The Brontes' demise is charted through the voice of Martha, the maid, who documents in her diary the suspicious happenings that follow Nicholls' arrival (while based on fact, the diary is fictional). After each entry, Tully intermingles Martha's observations with the fruits of his own investigation in an attempt to extrapolate how and why the siblings really died. Although Tully's argument isn't always entirely persuasive, this is nonetheless an adeptly constructed, compelling tale that is all the more sinister for the possibility of its truth. Steffanie Brown

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 284 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub; First edition. edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786706465
• ISBN-13: 978-0786706464
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,811,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars rubbish!, October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte: The Secrets of a Mysterious Family : A Novel (Hardcover)

I could somehow manage to read this book! I laughed at the too-much simple characterization of Bronte sisters: Charlotte the Evil, Emily the Good and Anne the Obscure. First of all, I was confused with the contradictory characters. Emily, who "loved all living creatures", could pass Nicholls' murder of her brother in silence. Nicholls was so ambitious that he would not marry a daughter of a mere country rector, but at last he was much satisfied to be a farmer in Ireland. This is a part of the contradictions. There are much more contradictions in this novel I do not wish to pass. This writer says that all Bronte works largely depend on Nicholls (who wrote only blunt letters in his life). What an absurd idea! I desperately wish this story could have a little more attractive ,either good or bad, characters and a little bit thrilling plot, not quite boring one! This novel taught me that one cannot make a pulling story, only with the name of famous people.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad evidence, bad writing, June 1, 2001

By 

Minsma (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte (Paperback)

James Tully dedicates his book, "Para mi querida J...--who I met when she was but seventeen and have loved deeply for some fifty years." Despite the sentimentality of this dedication, the book itself is deeply misogynistic. All the women are silly, devious, or both; gossipy, snoopy, ridiculously docile, and melting in the snares of a handsome man to commit atrocities--or else shrewish enough to drive him to murder. And worse--they are plagiarists! Tully would have us believe the Bronte sisters stole the work of poor, doomed, haunted brother Branwell, passed it off as their own, and then blackened Branwell's sainted name. Tully's evidence for this? The testimony of a couple of Branwell's pub cronies many years after the fact and when all the Brontes were safely dead. It is typical of the kind of "evidence" Tully provides to support his wild conjectures throughout the book. Smarmy remarks like, "Now, I am a mere male, but..." also do not help Tully make his case.

All this would probably be acceptable--controversy is the meat of literature, after all--if the "novel" was at least well written. It is, in fact, woefully bad--the narrative is flat, repetitive, indirect, while the characterizations are paper thin or stereotyped. Worst of all, each chapter consists of a supposed deposition from Bronte maid Martha Brown followed by commentary from a present-day investigator. This structure seriously bogs down the flow of the story and repeats the material just reviewed by Martha to tedious effect. I suspect the information provided by the present-day investigator, an ill-defined solicitor character, is simply a dumping ground for the nonfiction book Tully wanted to write (by his own admission) and couldn't sell because the case he presented for the Bronte "crimes" was so meager, thereby making his wild conclusions laughable. Unfortunately, there is nothing laughable about this novel--it is so bad it doesn't even inspire true irony.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars 1 star is too many for this book, December 1, 1999

By 

Summer "qingmi" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte: The Secrets of a Mysterious Family : A Novel (Hardcover)

This "novel" (warning: about to give the "plot" away) purports to be based on a diary of the Bronte family's servant, Martha Brown and is supposed to be the true account of how the Bronte sisters "mysteriously" died; supposedly, Arthur Bell Nichols (Mr. Bronte's curate, who after a long courtship married Charlotte) and Charlotte colluded in poisoning Emily and Anne, and then Nichols finished off Charlotte in a like manner. The "diary" portions of the story are interspersed with commentary and/or narrative by an attorney, Charles Coutts, who is supposed to have found the diary sometime after WWII. As a novel, it is pretty pale. The author does not even attempt to give Martha Brown an authentic-sounding voice, and the attorney's role is to reinterpret the standard Bronte biography in terms of the new "facts" Martha Brown reveals - for example, that Nichols got Emily pregnant and that was why he had to do her in. As a re-interpretation of the Bronte sisters' well-known biography, this book is irresponsible, unconvincing, and disgusting. Most people who have written about the Brontes have revealed that these lives were marked by staggering loneliness, depression, illness, and bereavement - along with remarkable creativity, piety, devotion to family, and sense of duty. The author of this book (deservedly obscure) apparently has no respect either for suffering, or the ability to transcend suffering.