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Emily's Ghost: A Novel of the Brontė Sisters

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Yorkshire, 1840s. Emily Bronte has given up hope of surviving what appears to be an advance condition of consumption. Yet she remains hopeful through her writing and her somewhat whirlwind relationship with her sister Charlotte and Anne and her wastrel of a brother Branwell. Writing is a big deal for the Brontes, and all sisters have a talent for it. And while Charlotte's stories stem from her days at a strict boarding school, Emily's stems from encountering ghosts. But now, as her health deteriorates, she looks back to her own personal ghosts: her childhood. Her life begins with her unwavering love for her father, to witnessing her brother's growing addiction, and ends with the competition that transpires between the sisters after they all fall for William Weightman, a young and flirtatious curate.

I began this novel with some trepidation. Having read some rather bad or mediocre fictional accounts of famous authors, I was ready to take this one with a grain of salt. However, Emily's Ghost is a beautiful, well written and touching story that centers on relationships and struggles in an accurate description of nineteenth century England. Denise Giardina must be one hell of a scholar and historian -- or at least knows the Brontes' history quite well. Her lyrical style drew me in from the very first page and I couldn't help entering Emily's mind. This is a Victorian gothic story, with the same sort of elements found in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The description of the Yorkshire moors is especially breathtaking. Both Emily and Charlotte would've been proud. It does step into the macabre in more than one occasion, but given that this is mainly centered on Emily, it works with the overall theme. So, if you're in the bargain for biographical fiction with some gothic elements, then Emily's Ghost is the way to go. Enjoy.

We know very little about the enigmatic Emily Brontė, writer of `Wuthering Heights' and some passionate, brilliant poetry. Emily is one of the three Brontė daughters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) who survived childhood. Together with their widowed father, Patrick, their brother Branwell and their Aunt Branwell they lived in the Yorkshire village of Haworth. Patrick was an Anglican minister appointed to the church of St Michael and All Angels.

I am enough of a Brontė fan to want to read all novels about them. This novel in particular appealed because it centres around Emily: my personal favourite. Ms Giardina has used known historical and biographical details as a foundation for her novel and this makes the characters come alive. The appointment of William Weightman as Patrick Brontė's curate serves as a pivotal point and much of the novel is built around the reaction by each of the sisters to him. It is in this way that we gain the measure of Emily's honest but unconventional independence. William and Emily have a mutual respect for each other which is deeper than physical attraction.

I became caught up in this novel, finding that Ms Giardina's depiction of Emily portrays the same strengths that I would accord her. There are echoes of `Wuthering Heights' in this depiction that I am not entirely comfortable with but they are consistent with what we can imagine of Emily based on her one published novel. Charlotte's meddling, too, is consistent with other reading I have done so I can imagine work of Emily's being altered or destroyed.

This is a well-written historical novel that will appeal to most Brontė fans. Those of us who have enjoyed the Brontė novels and poetry will feel right at home in this setting even if we imagine the detail differently.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Giardina immerses her characters, the accomplished Bronte sisters, in the stark northern English countryside of Haworth parish, where they live a meager existence with their father, Patrick, a widowed curate. Emily, Charlotte and the younger Anne seek whatever limited employment is available to them in the mid-19th century. Giardina describes a spare way of life, the sustenance of the soul in the face of want, the rich world of the mind a palliative against a merciless world. A memorable image: little Emily and Charlotte and their two older sisters huddling together for warmth under a thin blanket at a harsh boarding school, the older sisters expiring of consumption soon after. Years later, Charlotte, Emily and Anne are united in their love of literature, Emily comforted by the fanciful characters that people her imagination, Cathy and Heathcliff, Emily's "ghosts".

Oblivious to fate, Charlotte hopes to marry well, Emily not at all. William Wrightman, a young minister, arrives in Haworth to lighten the burden of the elderly curate and a great love story is born, albeit one forced into the shadows by a rigorous and unforgiving society. Wrightman makes an immediate impact on Haworth parish, on the frail Patrick Bronte, who will come to love the new minister as a son, on Charlotte, Emily and Anne, even on the dissipated Bronte heir, Branwell, who, in spite of his many bouts with alcohol and laudanum, becomes a great comfort to Wrightman. By the novel's end, Haworth parish will experience a cholera epidemic, political upheaval and the ministrations of a devoted young minister who unfailingly assists all in the hour of need.

Emily is a woman born too soon, afire with literature and stories, who has great sympathy for the dreary, soulless lives of the common people. From Giardina's perspective, the contrast between Emily and Charlotte is significant, Emily realizing early that "One did not confide weakness to Charlotte". Though the sisterly bonds are deep, Emily's fertile imagination transcends Charlotte's limitations. It is Emily who intuits Wrightman's fine character and sensibilities, his lack of ambition an irritant to Charlotte. In this regard, Giardina's palette is finely shaded, the language of love nuanced and fragile, grown in shadows but powerful nonetheless.

This unrequited affair is deeply moving in the harsh landscape of Emily's daily existence, where freedom is her greatest treasure. Set against a background of poverty and social unrest, a compelling and unconventional love story unfolds, soul mates destined to remain apart, a relationship that is beautiful, heartbreaking and tragic. As Emily stretches to accommodate her affection for the minister, she suffers the pangs of doubt only to be shattered by grief in an ending that is thoroughly wrenching. The romance between courageous Emily and the remarkable William is bittersweet, as is the fate of the Bronte family, lost in the pages of history, but rekindled for a few magic hours by a writer with an uncanny talent for revealing the rich interior lives of her extraordinary characters. Luan Gaines/2009.

If you've read at least one biography of the Brontes, you're apt to find this novelisation of the life of Emily and her family exasperating, if not downright irksome. For starters, Denise Giardina alters some of the more mundane facts for what seems to be no good reason (Emily's hawk was named Hero, for instance, not Nero as Giardina would have it). Then there's the principal conceit of the novel itself: that Emily and her father's curate William Weightman were deeply in love, a love so intense it drove her to prolonged fits of sobbing and even near-murder (don't ask). Giardina manages to explain away why no evidence of said love remains, but she never convinces that this scenario could have been. Some of that may be because she does more telling than showing. We're told that Emily's fictional world and her writing are at least as important to her as her real world, yet we're never given more than the barest glimpse of her alternative reality, nor do we see her writing. If, as we're told, Emily's fear of losing the freedom to imagine and write was the primary reason she refused to marry Weightman, shouldn't that aspect of her be delineated as much as her bread-baking and her training of her hawk?

As I read the book, I wondered repeatedly why Giardina didn't take the fictionalisation a step further, and make the protagonists not Emily and Weightman but, say, Elinor and Walter, who lived not in Yorkshire but in the Highlands. Was it because by draping this unlikely plot onto a well-known figure she could take short cuts in terms of setting the milieu? Personally I'd have enjoyed the book more if I wasn't continually thinking how dissimilar the Emily, and to a lesser degree, the Patrick Bronte of this book were to their real-life counterparts based on the knowledge I already had of them--especially as the plotting, pacing, and characterisations are quite entertaining, as is the writing for the most part (barring a few real clunker sentences).

All in all, instead of reading Emily's Ghost, I'd suggest picking up another recent novel about the Brontes, the far superior Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan--or rereading Wuthering Heights, which is what I started doing almost immediately upon finishing this book.

Once more an author attempting fiction about the Brontes has totally goofed up the facts. So Mary Taylor was supposedly at Cowan Bridge School with the little Bronte girls, huh? Nope, she wasn't. Most detestable of all, Charlotte is portrayed as a desperate, man-hungry old maid, a comical spinster plotting and scheming to catch a husband. This is revolting that an author wants to depict her thus. Charlotte never connived to get Willie Weightman into her snare or rabidly "hunted down men" in order to have them to marry her -- she turned down 3 other marriage proposals before accepting her 4th from Arthur Bell Nichols, in fact, and her infatuation with Monsieur Heger in Brussels was believed to be much encouraged by him.

Plus, William Weightman's quasi-romantic relationship with Emily in this novel never happened either. He was probably one of the few young guys she got closest to as a buddy, but those long intimate walks and exchanged confidences while they pined for one another - an almost neurotically shy and aloof girl wasn't going to get mushy with the young man her sisters teased and bantered with, and risk being the subject of their hilarious derision, however good-natured. Maybe there was more than a crush on Anne Bronte's part and as the prettiest and sweetest-natured of the sisters, he may have semi-seriously pined for her attentions and vigorously flirted, but otherwise, the author is really grabbing at "a new slant" for a book and this makes for an obnoxious and dippy novel. Don't bother with it except as something to add to one's repertoire of Bronte fiction, and some realistic - and accurate - descriptions of the ghastly illnesses rampant in that dangerously filthy sewer of the 1840's Haworth village.

Although I am familiar with Wuthering Heights and Jane Erye, I feel ashamed of saying I have never read them. I really never knew too much about the Bronte sisters. I am glad that I had no expectations when I chose this book to read. I found it to be wonderfully researched and written. I was so curious about the Bronte family, that I began researching their lives on the internet. From the first page I was grabbed. I didn't want to put it down. I could visualize 19th century Britain and it wasn't a pretty picture. I visited London with my family last year and tried to picture what it was like in the 1800's. The modesty of the times intrigued me and almost made me long for a time when men and women were not so openly lustful of each other. It seemed more romantic to write letters of longing without the sexual overtones of today's society. I highly recommend this book to anyone. Bronte fans or not.

As a teenage reader, I was obsessed with the Bronte sisters, and JANE EYRE has been my favorite novel for thirty years. Now I'm desperate to reread WUTHERING HEIGHTS! But you don't have to be a Bronte fan to fall in love with the writing, the characters and the story of EMILY'S GHOST. Anyone who appreciates historical fiction, family drama, and a beautifully crafted love story, will enjoy this novel.

The gradual development of the relationship between Emily and Willie is stunning, and even though you know what the outcome will be, you never give up hope that somehow history is wrong! And the end still haunts me. It makes sense, given what we know of the characters, but is an unexpected--and shocking--twist.

Fabulous, fabulous read. Don't wait for the paperback, people!

Set in the bleak landscape of the Yorkshire moors in the 1840s, Emily's Ghost is the story of the Bronte sisters, but especially Emily. The girls' father hires a curate named William Weightman, a young man with radical beliefs who becomes very popular with the ladies of Haworth village. Although it is Charlotte who becomes infatuated with the curate, Weightman forms a strong attachment to the unconventional Emily.

Often, with historical fiction, a strong "unconventional" woman equals "modern." Not so with Emily Bronte in this novel. She'd rather be out roaming the moors, or writing her stories, than flirt or talk about men like other young women her age. Emily's not conventional at all, but she proves herself to be strong and brave, even during an unthinkable tragedy.

The reader should be forewarned that the author takes a number of liberties with the Brontes' biographies. Sometimes it helps with the story; at other times, it hinders. And Charlotte Bronte fans may be disappointed with the author's portrayal of her; she comes off as a bit foolish and flighty, falling in love with every eligible (and ineligible) man who comes her way.

But for the most part, I enjoyed this novel, about love and faith, and how someone's legacy can live well beyond the grave. It's a pretty strong statement, too, that Charlotte makes with her decision at the end of the book.

If you're a huge fan of Charlotte Bronte, this book isn't for you. But if you and Emily are kindred spirits and the wildness in Wuthering Heights resounded for you, then you'll feel like you're right there on the moors with her.

A fine new novel of the Bronte sisters and William Weightman, the brave liberal-minded pastor who came rushing into
their needy and undernourished lives. The character of Emily is beautifully imagined, and Weightman (I confirmed
through the internet and other sources) was a real historical personage and persistent presence in the lives of
the sisters--one quite capable of impacting their lives in the manner depicted in this novel. After reading it, I
felt, "This is the way it must have been" and even "This IS Emily!" Charlotte, on the other hand, may have been a
little short-shrifted, although her personal failings--egotism, self-righteousness, a complete absence of humor--
are quite apparent in her own novels, and she too is convincingly portrayed in this one. We pity her, her sister
Anne, lost brother Bramwell, and well-meaning, unimaginative father; but we are amazed and pleasurably confounded
by Emily. Very highly recommended!