Lucasta Miller is on the trail of the literary sleuths in The Brontë Myth. I found the chapters on Emily a lot more interesting than the ones concerning Charlotte, perhaps because Miller spends a great deal of time on Gaskell's biography, its errors, and its reception (which is indeed where a great deal of the myths about the Brontes get started, but there's been a lot more modern scholarship since then which gets treated glancingly only near the very end of both parts). Emily the mystic rebel became Emily the lesbian, a new 'image' first propounded in the 1930s by Virginia Moore and taken up again by Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae. by Anchor. Brief phrases in Radio Times are cited as sources of equal interest as the careful musings of Sinclair. How did Charlotte fall from saintly heroine to bossy older sister? Someone had to protect and salvage their reputations. She also explores the theoretical issues — and subjective experiences — which the practice of afterlife study involves. Probably 3.5 - but found it a little repetitive. Miller supplies a deft and immaculately detailed tracing of the many 'constructions' of Charlotte Brontë, from her initial disguise as the elusive and haughty Currer Bell, to her tentative unveiling (and immediate censure as 'unfemininely' candid about Jane Eyre's passions and predilections), to the self-abnegating daughter of Mrs Gaskell's biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. I realize this comparison isn't the best, but I make it because, like people who claim to spot the "King's" ghost to this day and visit Graceland as if it's Eden, literary fans through the past three centuries have apparently spoken to the Bronte sisters through seances and continue to flock to Haworth Parsonage like it's their personal Mecca. Their lives and work have been interpreted and reinterpreted hundreds of times, beginning with Mrs. Gaskell's effort shortly after Charlotte's death. The Bronte sisters (for they are often depicted as a group rather than as individuals) have long captured the hearts - and imaginations- of the general public. As three androgynous pseudonyms whose novels breached the limits of Victorian propriety, they were a novelty to the public. Either we are always more incredulous than tourist boards would have us - knowing in our postmodernish fashion that nothing is quite as the forces of hard sell make it seem - or we are distracted by the bleats of the heritage racket, in which case our engagement with the works is already tainted. Demand for snippets of her handwriting grew so persistent that the Brontës' maligned father, Patrick, was forced to cut Charlotte's letters into tiny pieces, sending them out to fans as gnomic one-liners. Engagingly and accessibly written. But I did think that she rather harped on how much biographers have misrepresented the Brontes -which is true, of course- and didn't seem to take into account that SHE'S a biographer and could be doing the same thing. Fascinating and detailed account of how the personal Bronte myths have often detracted or apologized for the works themselves. Lucasta Miller revisits her 2001 book The Brontë Myth to explore the thinking behind it. She implies they have a secluded childhood, and Charlotte is basically sexless and pious. The Bronte Myth. As three androgynous pseudonyms whose novels breached the limits of Victorian propriety, they were a novelty to the public. She implies they have a secluded childhood, and Charlotte is basically sexless and pious. Mistrusts its sliding into fiction, its phoney cries of disinterestedness reveals where this image came from and how took. Find books like the Brontë Myth is a powerful book that surely requires more study than just through... 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