The Bronte Myth

The Bronte Myth

Summary

A fascinating and wonderfully readable deconstruction of the countless myths that have grown up around the Brontës.

Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Bronte 'biography' appearing. These range from pious accounts in Victorian conduct books to Freudian pyschobiographies, from plays, films and ballets to tourist brochures and images on tea-towels, from sensation-seeking penny-a-liners to meticulous works of sober scholarship. 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.

The Bronte Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture and Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontes themselves.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR

Reviews

  • A brilliant and riveting examination of the Bronte phenomenon
    Daily Mail

About the author

Lucasta Miller

Lucasta Miller is a biographer and critic, whose articles have appeared in a wide number of publications, especially the Guardian. She is the author of two previous books on nineteenth-century literature, The Brontë Myth and L.E.L.: the Lost Life and Mysterious Death of the 'Female Byron', and is currently an Honorary Research Associate at University College, London and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
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