The biographical tradition surrounding the Brontës is problematic. In many ways, stories surrounding the sisters' personal histories have overshadowed their fiction. Indeed, much of the popular interest which has surrounded them for a century and a half has centered on their lives and circumstances more than their literary output. Henry James and Virginia Woolf, among others, were concerned about this tendency towards fetishizing biography, as they felt it was in danger of obscuring the fact that these women were great novelists. In his introduction to Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, Terry Eagleton says "The Brontës, like Shakespeare, are a literary industry as well as a collection of literary texts."

The industry began production in 1857, when the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who had known Charlotte and the other sisters shortly before their deaths, published The Life of Charlotte Brontë. It is at once both a stunning achievement of literary biography and a book with an agenda. Gaskell wrote with the intention of making Charlotte famous. Charlotte and her sisters had scandalized early Victorian society with their frank and unflinching descriptions of the feminine mind and emotions. Their characters' emotional responses are so real that they were disturbing to a society which saw the heroines of Austen and Ann Radcliffe as exemplars of feminine virtue. But the Charlotte of Gaskell's Life, far from being the forward-thinking author of some edgy books, is an introspective, quiet, reserved genius, the dutiful daughter of a country cleric.

There has followed a century and a half of exploration into the sisters' characters. There have been exposes, vindications, fictionalized accounts, reminiscences and celebrations. Particularly troubling is the utter lack of source material from Anne and Emily aside from their novels and poetry, making their elusiveness all the more appealing to invention. In the early twentieth century, what remained the Brontës' manuscripts and letters fell into the hands of Thomas J. Wise, one of the most infamous academic forgers and frauds in the history of literary research; Brontë studies as a pursuit is still recovering from the damage caused by his inventive methods of scholarship, which included the destruction of material and the manufacture of new material to fit his own critical arguments and the widespread dispersal of the papers for his own financial benefit.

The year 1994 was, in many ways, a golden year for Brontë studies. In that year, three immensely well written books appeared, Stevie Davies Emily Brontë: Heretic, Lyndall Gordon's Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life, and Juliet Barker's expansive The Brontës, perhaps the definitive biography of the entire family. It is indeed interesting to note that even more than 150 years on, scarcely a year goes by without some work of Brontë biography being published.

The following list highlights some of the more noteworthy examples of Brontë biography.

Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1994.

Perhaps the definitive biography of the entire Brontë family, and certainly the largest in scope. Barker assays virtually every available scrap of evidence relating to the Brontës to arrive at a pristine presentation of their lives. The book begins before the birth of Patrick in Ireland and ends with the death of Arthur Bell Nichols in Ireland almost a century and a half later. This is a good source of meta-biography about the Brontës as well, for Barker examines the history of the biographical tradition of the family.

Barker, Juliet. The Brontës: A Life in Letters. New York: Overlook Press, 2002.

Follow-up to Barker's expansive biography of the Brontës, essentially a selection of letters, including most of the important letters of Charlotte and Branwell, and most of the surviving pieces from the letters and diaries of Emily and Anne. Barker reexamines the manuscripts and corrects some errors made by previous editors. She also provides annotation throughout. (not available in the UNC libraries)

Cannon, John. The Road to Haworth: The Story of the Brontës' Irish Ancestry. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.

This work concentrates on the paternal side of the Brontë family's ancestry, presenting what is known about the Brunty family, who were relatively affluent farmers in Ireland. Special attention is focused on the Brontës' grandparents and on Patrick's ascent to becoming a teacher in his teens at a small school for local farmer's children in County Down, and his eventual emigration to England to attend university at Cambridge, where he changed the spelling of his name to its now famous form. The book also presents evidence of the effect of the Irish ancestry on the novels themselves.

Chadwick, Ellis H. In the Footsteps of the Brontës. London: Isaac Pittman and Sons, 1914.

A very early sentimental biography of the family by a devotee. She actually lived for a number of years in Haworth and was able to interview a number of individuals who remembered the family. The sisters, especially Charlotte, are typified as exemplars of the dutiful cleric's daughter. This is one of the works which, like Gaskell's, gave rise to the "Brontë Myth." For more on this, see Miller, below.

Early Visitors to Haworth. ed. Charles Lemon. Haworth: The Brontë Society, 1996.

The first section of this work is a fascinating collection of first-hand historical accounts of the Brontës by their West Yorkshire contemporaries after they became celebrities. The second section collects various accounts of a later generation of literary tourists who visited Haworth after their deaths, the most famous being Virginia Woolf. This monograph is an excellent format for the presentation of shorter source materials which are only summarized or paraphrased elsewhere.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. ed. Angus Easson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

This is one of the many available editions of what must be, after Boswell's Life of Johnson, the most influential biography in the English language. Written at Patrick's request in the years immediately following Charlotte's death in 1855, this book, when it was published in 1857, was an immediate bestseller, and is at once both loved and reviled by scholars and Brontë enthusiasts. Loved for its scope, its attention to detail, its status as one of the finest presentations of a real, nineteenth-century female, and reviled for its portraits of of the other two sisters as subservient and backwards and for the fact that it possessed a strong ideological agenda- namely, to paint a picture of Charlotte Brontë as the devoted and loving daughter of a country cleric who happened to achieve fame with her pen. In some sense the book denies her the complexity she is due, for she clearly had an ego to match that of any other Victorian novelist, a desire that her name "be forever known," and was, among other things, a secret admirer of the scandalous Byron and the possessor of a clear and discerning eye capable of transmitting to the page the individual realities of normal, unromantic females who were not afraid to make their own way in the world. All Brontë biographies after (indeed, it would not be an exageration to suggest that all literary biographies after) are an attempt to come to terms with it. Inescapable and indespensable to anyone wishing to study the Brontës.

Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.

Reexaming material from a variety of sources, including letters, diaries and the manuscript of Charlotte's last, unpublished novel, Emma, Lyndall presents Charlotte as a progressive feminist, seeker of fame and nonconformist in a society when such things were looked upon as proof of "unladylike" behavior. The book in particular challenges Gaskell's biographical presentation of Charlotte as the meek and long-suffering victim of unfortunte circumtances.

Lane, Margaret. The Brontë Story. London: Heinemann, 1953.

The is less a biographical account of the Brontës than a footnote to the methods which have been employed to create biographical accounts of them. Of particular interest is a history of Gaskell's Life and the methodology she used in collecting material for it and writing it. Many of the myths which scholars believe were first perpetrated by Gaskell are examined, and some of them debunked.

Leyland, Francis A. The Brontë Family. ed. Charles Lemon. London: Routledge, 1997.

Two volume vindication of Branwell Brontë by one of his personal friends. Specifically, the author sets out to refute the damage he feels has been done to his friend's character by Gaskell in her Life. Branwell is presented as a talented and promising youth whose decline was more a result of misfortunes of circumstance than of his own seeming need for self-destruction. This reissue by Routledge is wonderfully edited by Lemon.

Lock, John and Dixon, W. T. A Man of Sorrow. Westport, CT: Meckler Books, 1979.

A biography of Patrick Brontë, with details of his daughters' lives examined through letters and journal entries written by him. The title refers to the fact that he was preceded in death by his wife and all sixe of his children, and this late period of his life, after Charlotte's death, is particularly examined. This edition has a foreward by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

MacDonald, Frederika. The Secret of Charlotte Brontë. Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1914.

A pulpy, expose-style account of Charlotte's infatuation with Constantin Heger, her professor while studying French in Brussels. Their relationship is examined, with particular attention paid to some of the lurid letters to Heger and the journal entries which supposedly refer to him. The author travels to Brussels herself an interviews a number of individuals who knew Charlotte and Emily in the year they were attending school there.

Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Random House, 2001.

A thoroughly researched examination of the "cult" which has surrounded the Brontës since their deaths. At the turn of the twentieth century, Henry James and Virginia Woolf both commented that the biography worship which surrounded the Brontës was in serious danger of obscurring the fact that they were great authors. Miller examines why this fetishisizing of the family has occured and sets herself the task of debunking various myths which have attached to the family and looks at the media's interpretation of their lives and fiction and at the creation of the "Brontë Industry" which so intrigued Eagleton in Myths of Power. There is also excellent discussion here of some of the dramatic and film interpretations of the fiction.

Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. New York: Norton, 1976.

This biographer takes a psychological approach to her recounting of Charlotte's life, focusing on her childhood and adult fantasies as evidenced by what survives from her vast juvinile writings.

Shorter, Clement K. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896.

This book is famous for playing a role in one of the most unfortunate epsiodes in the history of literary research. Shorter acquired most of Charlotte and Branwell's papers and manuscripts from Arthur Bell Nichols shortly before Nichols died. They were used as the basis for this collection, which represented th first time that most of the material had been printed. Sadly, the originals were to wind up, along with Charlotte's letters to Ellen Nussey, in the possession of Thomas J. Wise, the unscrupulous editor of the complete edition of the Brontës' works. Wise dispersed the papers to collectors around the world for his own personal gain, and selectively destroyed letters and diary entries and created fraudulent ones to suit his own arguments; Brontë scholarship has never fully recovered from this episode.

Link to Davis Library's catalog

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