The Brontë myth

Resource Information

The work The Brontë myth represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Chemeketa Cooperative Regional Library Service (CCRLS). This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

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Label

The Brontë myth

Statement of responsibility

Lucasta Miller

Creator

• trueMiller, Lucasta

Subject

• trueAuthors, English -- 19th century -- Biography
• Biographies
• Brontë family
• Brontë family
• Brontë, Anne, 1820-1849
• Brontë, Anne, 1820-1849
• Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855
• Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855
• Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848
• Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848
• 1800-1899
• trueEngland -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
• Haworth (England) -- Biography
• trueHaworth, England
• Novelists, English
• Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography
• trueWomen authors -- England -- 19th century -- Biography
• Women novelists, English
• Women novelists, English -- Biography
• England -- Haworth

Genre

• trueBiography
• trueBiographies

Language

eng

Summary

"Lucasta Miller, in The Bronte Myth, shows us how the Brontes become cultural symbols almost as soon as their novels were published; how they became notorious even before the veil dropped from their carefully chosen pseudonyms, as Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, appearing out of nowhere, instantly fascinated, inspired, and scandalized English readers." "The subsequent discovery that Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were three youngish spinsters - parson's daughters - living rural lives of utmost propriety made interest in the sisters obsessive. Add a supposedly ferocious father and untimely death, to say nothing of the Victorian penchant for seeing noble sacrifice in every possible situation, and the production of legends multiplied." "Lucasta Miller provides fascinating insight into the manufacture of cultural myth and how it can distort our memory of the artist even as it obscures the art. She traces the reinterpretations, indeed recreations, of the Brontes, from Charlotte's own efforts to soften her dead sisters' reputations and Mrs. Gaskell's classic portrait of the artists as exemplary Christian ladies to the fashionably Freudian psychobiographies of the 1920s and '30s, from counterfeit memorabilia and the promotion of literary tourism to Hollywood representations of gloomy heroines on savage windswept moors. She rescues the Brontes from their admirers and attackers, giving us back three vivid women who were writing in the days when few women dared to try: geniuses and sisters who, in the words of a household witness in the late 1850s, were "as cheerful and full of spirits as possible ... full of fun and merriment.""--Jacket

Biography type

collective biography

Cataloging source

JDD

Dewey number

• 823/.809
• B

Index

index present

LC call number

PR4168

LC item number

.M49 2003

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography