Literary heavyweights, living or dead, make demanding guests when they settle in with their biographers. Juliet Barker had Wordsworth as a lodger for years. Prior to that, she took in the Brontës for absolutely ages - not only the sisters, but the whole tribe of relatives as well.
Barker is a historian who has decided that there is much more of interest in the lives of great writers than we're told in purely literary biographies by academics and critics. So far, her excavations of literary sites with a different set of scholarly tools has taken up more than a decade - five years for Wordsworth and six for Emily, Charlotte and Anne. But the results have been fruitful: two fat bestsellers, one thinner spin-off - The Brontës: A Life in Letters - with a similar letter-based collection planned for Wordsworth. In the process, she has cocked a snook at those scholars who ignore manuscripts and simply mug up previous biographies, published diaries and edited correspondence.
Barker was born in Yorkshire but got her degree at Oxford, after which she returned to her native county, married a fellow graduate and settled in Bradford. It was then that she landed her dream job: curator and librarian of the Brontë Parsonage museum.
"I'd been nuts about the Brontës as a child," she says. Her only frustration was that with so many literary beavers around, Barker thought there would never be room for the book she was longing to write. But early in her six years at Haworth she realised that "researchers were coming in and reading the printed sources. They weren't going back to original manuscripts. But there were hundreds of manuscripts which had never been looked at."
This rankled, and so did the relatively scant attention writers paid the Brontë males and to Haworth as it was from 1820 when the Brontës moved there. The town was more industrial and more cultural, with its 13 working mills and choral society, than most researchers realised. This, says Barker, was because most of them followed Mrs Gaskell's 1857 life of Charlotte, "which ignored the fact that the industrial revolution had happened".
Barker wrote her wide-angle Brontë saga after leaving the parsonage. The sisters' (and Branwell's) love of the Lake poets, and her own intimacy with the Lake District, led her to take the same approach to her next project: Wordsworth.
"People tend to treat famous writers as if they lived in an ivory tower," she explains, "but as a historian, I came to it from a different angle - there must be records about them." Indeed, many of William's relatives wrote copious correspondence, and, as with the Brontës, Barker found there were new things to say. Wordsworth's early, revolutionary years are well chronicled. But the poet's life lasted from 1770 to 1850, and she felt the later decades, when he became a major public figure, deserved more attention.
With two big successes, it might seem that Barker has had an easy time of it. It's true, she says, that she has lived and worked in pleasant parts of the north; has "the luxury of writing at home" without the burden of an academic job, and at the same time is able to bring up her two children.
But with the Brontës and Wordsworth forming part of the heritage industry, her path hasn't always been lined with waving daffodils. She has had conflicts with the charitable trusts running the homes (and archives) of her two subjects, and a chilly experience with a publisher.
Barker, though charming, is a fighter at heart. For a historian, it's essential to go to primary sources, and the trusts have a duty to give scholars access to their archives. But Barker has found that "literary societies feel they have to tend the flame, and they don't like it if somebody comes in from outside. They're afraid of hostile books."
At Haworth, permission was was refused to use pictures in the parsonage as illustrations for her book. She won't say what the difficulty was with the Wordsworth Trust, though she acknowledges the staff were generally helpful. "I'm not telling you. I can't afford to." She hints that an unspecified "they" could cause difficulties for the forthcoming Life in Letters of the poet.
So there is a tough side to delving into the life and lit of sacred authors, however long they've been canonised. And there are also the equivocations of publishers to deal with.
Barker recalls that she had delivered her massive Brontë tome to Weidenfeld on time, and had proofread it. "Then, six weeks before publication, they turned around and said they couldn't publish it unless I accepted a five per cent royalty instead of the 12.5% I was supposed to receive. I was stuck; I had to accept it."
She's still touchy about the issue. She was none too pleased, either, with the firm she moved to for the Wordsworth project. The advance and a magnificent length for the tome were agreed. But she is a bit peeved that Penguin insisted on abridging the paperback version in order to appeal to a wider readership. She points out that the hardback was 987 pages long, as was her Brontë book. The paperback is only 548 pages. "And it has no notes."
A legitimate gripe for a historian - but will most of her readers really feel cheated?
