The Brontës: A Life in Letters

Barker's selection of letters reveals the authentic voices of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, as well as their brother, Branwell, and father, Reverend Patrick Bronte. Charlotte was a letter-writer of supreme ability, ranging from facetious notes and intimate gossip to artfully composed pages of literary criticism, while Emily and Anne remain tantalizingly evasive, as few of their letters are extant. The letters detail the siblings' strange, self-absorbed childhood, highlighted by wild imaginative games and the years of struggle to earn a living before "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" took the literary world by storm. The letters continue through the final years and the terrible marring of success as one by one Branwell, Emily, and Anne died tragically young and as Charlotte, battling against grief, loneliness and ill-health, emerged from anonymity to take her place in London literary society and, finally, found all too brief happiness in marriage to her father's curate.