The Brontë Myth
Lucasta Miller
335pp, Jonathan Cape, £18.99
If the Brontë myth has a long and enduring history, so too does its debunking. In 1904 Henry James spoke disparagingly of readers' "beguiled infatuation" with the story of the sisters, and Miller claims her own starting point was Terry Eagleton's 25-year-old Myths of Power , a study of the "literary industry" surrounding the Brontës.
Perhaps the funniest of recent demythologisations was that undertaken in the early 1980s by comedian Victoria Wood. In a sketch (available on LP) she plays a guide whose tour of the Parsonage largely involves pointing at the window and telling the group that the wind out there is probably "wuthering", and that in the restaurant the health-conscious might like to try the Branwell burger. Miller provides both her own critical biography of the Brontës, with an inevitable emphasis on Charlotte, and what she calls a metabiography - a consideration of the way that the writers' lives, as well as their works, have, over the years, been appropriated for all sorts of cultural purposes.
She digests a plethora of material on the Brontës and their cultural "afterlife", not only in the biscuit tins and tea-towels of Howarth, but also in film, all manner of fiction and, indeed, literary criticism itself. She also draws on recent scholarly work on mid-Victorian culture. All this is done with a deft and light touch, and the excesses and bizarre confusions of Brontëmania are revealed with wry and engaging humour. We learn, for example, that Emily was voted "twentieth most erotic person of the millennium" by readers of the Erotic Review; that a recent ballet biography of the sisters represented the moors with dancers in tie-dyed sarongs; and that in 1994 the Brontë Society organised a contest in which members competed to see which of their dogs most resembled the Brontës' pets, Keeper and Grasper. The fact that in Howarth the Brontës have a distinctive and picturesque shrine for pilgrims to visit is not an insignificant part of their continuing success as literary icons.
More seriously, and in some detail, Miller explores the persistent, and she thinks insidious, legacy of Mrs Gaskell's 1857 Life of Charlotte Brontë, the "Ur-biography" and the work that transformed Charlotte from the "coarse" Currer Bell into a mid-Victorian self-denying "angel in the house". This image was challenged in 1913 when a group of passionate if ambiguous letters to the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger allowed a post-Freudian Charlotte to emerge. Much talk of sublimation ensued.
Meanwhile, Emily, whose life as well as work slotted more easily into modernist mythopoetic agendas, began to find a new audience. In the 1970s, the balance of power between the siblings shifted again, when in the wake of the women's movement a proto-feminist Charlotte was revived. Anne, it must be said, has never contributed much to "the Brontë myth".
What is particularly troubling about all this, Miller suggests, is that so much energy is expended on speculation about the lives that there is little left for a proper examination of their literary art. We must, she finally admonishes, "turn the tables and put the writings first".
Fair enough, we might think, but isn't there also an abundance of work on the writings - and, more generally, is the reading and the writing of not entirely accurate biographies really so damaging for writers? Miller begins by confessing that she used to read books on the Brontës "compulsively", and her sometimes vehement condemnation of biography-lovers has a little of the reformed addict about it.
Ironically though, books such as this, designed to chastise readers enthralled by the writer's life rather than work, end up simply feeding their obsession. Who, after all, will buy this book? Furthermore, writers themselves are often as guilty, if not more so, of mythologising as their lowbrow readers, and with often fruitful results.
Both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were fascinated by the life as well as the work of Emily Brontë, and that fascination fed into their poetry. And in her own search for literary models, Emily Brontë drew almost as extensively on Thomas Moore's heavily mythologised life of Byron as on the poet's works. A good story is a good story, whether or not it happens to be true.
However precise literary biography may become, and however much readers are exhorted to focus on the text, the text and nothing but the text, it seems that myths surrounding authors will not be easy to dispel. We still crave "exemplary lives", and it is not clear that that is actually as bad a thing as Miller claims it to be.
