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A review by justabean_reads
The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
My Brontë knowledge more or less comes down to reading three of their books and watching To Walk Invisible long enough ago that I remember very little of it (*looks it up* so... that came out three years ago? I guess it was not a terribly memorable movie). A friend suggested this book as a companion to reading the novels.
Coming from someone who is mostly familiar with the Brontës as authors and part of the English Lit canon, this book turned out to be quite an adventure. I had no idea how much mythologising Charlotte and Emily had gotten since their deaths. Miller does a great job of setting up the basics of their lives (as far as we have records), and then watching subsequent biographers play the most amazing game of projecting on the author telephone you've ever seen. They're represented as everything from perfect Victorian Angels of the House to mystic vessels of divine poetic gift to sexual psychopaths bent on murder. (Miller is often quite sarcastic in handling some of the more out there takes.) I liked how Miller explained the origins of each interpretation and then traced it forward through its various manifestations, leading up to present day (ish, the book's fifteen years old) Brontë scholarship.
About two thirds of the book is about Charlotte and one third about Emily. Apparently no one cared enough about Anne to mythologise her, but she gets about half a page in the section on feminism. There's a wonderful mic drop at the end where Miller compares the past treatment of Charlotte and Emily to the more contemporary treatment of Sylvia Plath and concludes: "We have to decide where the cultural value of these artists lies. It is time to turn the tables and put the writings first."
Coming from someone who is mostly familiar with the Brontës as authors and part of the English Lit canon, this book turned out to be quite an adventure. I had no idea how much mythologising Charlotte and Emily had gotten since their deaths. Miller does a great job of setting up the basics of their lives (as far as we have records), and then watching subsequent biographers play the most amazing game of projecting on the author telephone you've ever seen. They're represented as everything from perfect Victorian Angels of the House to mystic vessels of divine poetic gift to sexual psychopaths bent on murder. (Miller is often quite sarcastic in handling some of the more out there takes.) I liked how Miller explained the origins of each interpretation and then traced it forward through its various manifestations, leading up to present day (ish, the book's fifteen years old) Brontë scholarship.
About two thirds of the book is about Charlotte and one third about Emily. Apparently no one cared enough about Anne to mythologise her, but she gets about half a page in the section on feminism. There's a wonderful mic drop at the end where Miller compares the past treatment of Charlotte and Emily to the more contemporary treatment of Sylvia Plath and concludes: "We have to decide where the cultural value of these artists lies. It is time to turn the tables and put the writings first."