The Brontë Myth

"Each generation has rewritten the Brontes to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. Charlotte has been a domestic saint, a sex-starved hysteric, a bitch and an ambitious professional. Emily, her more mysterious sister, has been supplied with apocryphal lovers of both sexes and even denied the authorship of Wuthering Heights by conspiracy theorists trying to prove it was written by her brother Branwell." "The Bronte Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture. A bold attempt to unravel what Henry James described as 'the most complete intellectual muddle ever achieved on a literary question by our wonderful public', it is witty, erudite, and refreshingly unsentimental. Ultimately, indeed, Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontes themselves."--Jacket.