And I'm not talking about the books they wrote. Apparently the Bronte sisters are becoming fictional fodder themselves, in a big way; maybe authors are getting tired of playing off Jane Austen?
Whatever. It can't be denied that there's a certain mystique to the young woman up on the moors, living in a dreary parsonage with a cemetery in their front yard, writing books of passion and not necessarily traditional romance.
Just because they lived those lives, though, should other writers try to capitalize on them? That depends--on the author.
Emily's Ghost, by Denise Giardina, focuses primarily on Emily, who, of course, authored Wuthering Heights, a book that seems to polarize people (I fall firmly into the camp of "love it"). Who was this woman who wrote such a strange and dark book (not to mention reams of poetry) and died far too young? Well, according to Giardina, she's a fairly standard-issue misunderstood heroine, someone who just needs the love of a good man to finally bring her around to the conventionality she seems to hide from. To that end, Giardina suggests that Rev. Bronte's curate, William Weightman, was Emily's secret love, a passion that is suggested was felt by him too, but who--wait for it--died too soon (if this many early deaths took place in a truly fictional work, people would laugh--once again, truth is stranger than fiction).
Unfortunately, Giardini's characterizations are pretty much boilerplate, with Emily as the misunderstood heroine, Charlotte as a bitchy, simpering wench (who seems unlikely to have written Jane Eyre and Villette), and Anne as a juvenile with a crush and not much else worth examining.
Are you getting the impression that I didn't much like the book? Yeah, pretty much. It wasn't terrible--I did read it through to the end, rather than giving up partway through. But the characterization didn't cover any new or particularly interesting ground. And, frankly, a scene towards the end of the book portrays Emily hearing a live performance of Beethoven's Ninth, with this description: "The music washed over Emily in waves, an orgasm of sound and emotion."
Really? Really?
In contrast, Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow, while not necessarily offering up anything previously undiscovered, is a vast fictional improvement. It's an elegant book that doesn't try to ape the Brontes' writing style, but pays homage to it with a serious but highly readable tone. It also looks at the lives of the three writing Bronte sisters, rather than only focusing on one, and in doing so, offers a fresh and in-depth look at what the sisters' lives might have been like, and what they might have been like. In Morgan's book, Emily is several degrees past eccentric, but unlike Giardini's view of Emily as misunderstood, Morgan portrays her as a true individual who could be extremely difficult or uncomfortable to be around, yet not unlikable. Charlotte has her quirks, but her surface world is at conflict with the world within; rather than the simpering lightweight of Giardini's book, she is much closer to the emotionally complex Lucy Snowe of Charlotte's novel Villette. And Anne, a model of goodness much the same as Beth in Little Women or Mary in the Little House books, at least has an interior life that shows her struggle with the desire to behave properly versus her own emotions.
As all three sisters cope with the decline of their brother Branwell and their private miseries, Morgan writes beautifully of the landscape around them, both interior and exterior. She writes of Branwell's final decline:
"Branwell's unhappiness, the ruling passion of the house in the weeks and months that follow, is not really a lack or a negative. It defines him. It is all he has; and it is as if, having made defeated stabs at so many things in life, he means to make a thoroughgoing success of this. A lesser being, a more commonplace person, might be betrayed occasionally into acceptance, into quiet, into momentary pleasure. No such backsliding for Branwell. He is a pedant and perfectionist of misery."
Both books draw on the known biographical details of the Brontes' lives, but Morgan is more content to let the story tell itself, rather than force the reader into conclusions that are iffy. There are more fictionalized accounts to come, but I'm hard-pressed to think anyone will top Morgan's work.
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