A Word about Freedom and Bridge of Sighs

Article first published as A Word about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs on Blogcritics.

The coincidence of starting to read Jonathan Franzen's latest blockbuster Freedom immediately upon having finished a re-reading of Richard Russo's 2007 Bridge of Sighs focused my attention on what seemed to me to be a surprising number of similarities, similarities I would have been unlikely to notice had I not read the two books in such close proximity. This is especially true, since I hadn't even remembered having already read the Russo novel, until I was about fifty or so pages back into it. It hadn't made much of an impression. While the novels are different in detail and scope, the similarities are interesting and worth noting.

Let me point some of them out. Both deal with a love triangle between two men and a woman. One of the men is a nice guy, but not very exciting and not very attractive to the ladies. The other is a wild guy with artistic pretensions (who does in the end become a successful artist, in one case a painter, the other a musician) who is the proverbial "chick magnet." The woman chooses the safe guy and marries him, but always has some regrets about that choice, regrets that she deals with and conquers by the end of the novel. In both novels one of the spouses writes a lengthy autobiographical essay as a therapeutic exercise, and in both, the essay is read by the other spouse and causes a separation. The separation is resolved, although it takes longer in Freedom, when the couple recognizes the strength of their love and forgives past sins. Both novels alternate long sections from each of the character's perspectives, although Franzen includes other characters.

I don't point out these similarities to suggest influence. What seems to me interesting is the effect of proximity on a reader. Had I not just have finished reading Russo how different would my reading of Franzen been? Once I began noticing the similarities, I found myself obsessing over them, looking for more examples. What had I missed as a result? On the other hand, had I gained something by focusing on these similarities? Freedom is a remarkable book. It has been justly acclaimed over and over again. Bridge of Sighs is fine, but it is not Russo at his best. Still, the similarities between the two might also have a reflexive effect. The stature of Franzen's novel lends some gravitas to Russo's earlier use of similar material. These are novels that in some sense speak to each other when read in tandem.

While both books focus on social and political issues, they are more clearly front and center in Franzen's book which deals overtly with environmental issues, corporate malfeasance, and overpopulation. Russo focuses on the economic blight caused by industrial flight. Franzen's characters are directly involved in political activities. Russo's characters suffer the effects of social change and have to overcome them. Franzen's canvas is wider, even considering Russo's detours to Italy in Bridge of Sighs. But in each book, the novelist creates a world in which human relationships function against a socio-political backdrop that is as important as emotional connection.

Obviously every individual's experience of any work of art is influenced by what their experience with other works. One has to wonder however how many critical judgments that have become accepted dogma result from the kinds of proximate experiences I had with Russo and Franzen. Were I reviewing Freedom, what might I have said differently had I not had Bridge of Sighs so recently planted in my consciousness? Proximity may well lead to valuable insights; it might equally well send the reader careening down an errant path. Of course, there is no way to tell. There is no way to go back and unread Russo, and even if it were possible, who knows if it would be desirable.

Two Academic Novels: Ravelstein and Straight Man

This article was first published at The Compulsive Reader:


That there should be a proliferation of novels about the academy is not surprising, considering so many novelists today find themselves attached on one level or another, at some time or other, to the university for the money and leisure that will allow them to feed themselves and their families while they pursue their craft. There is a distinction to be made, however, between those novels in which the main character or characters happen to be academics and what may be more properly called academic novels.

In the former, a character's professorial position, while an essential element in defining his character, is no less essential an aspect of that character than would be played by any other profession--plumber for example. Such novels tend to pay little attention to the university community except to provide setting, a context of sorts. Those works more properly classified as academic novels, on the other hand, find in the university community and its customs and mores, its interpersonal; relations, their very reason for being. Saul Bellow's Ravelstein is an example of the former, Richard Russo's Straight Man, the latter.

Ravelstein, prestigious and influential professor of political philosophy, is the central figure of the eponymous novel. He is dying of AIDS, and has asked his friend Chick to write a biographical memoir. His relations with students and colleagues are detailed, but they are secondary to other things: his lavish spending on clothes; his love affair with France and things French; his thoughts about the after life, the nature of love, and the impact of anti-Semitism; his love of a good joke. That he is a professor is really no more or less significant than that he is gay, that he doesn't care for those who flaunt their homosexuality, and that though he lives with a young man, their relationship, he claims, is not sexual. The novel is the portrait of this man who happens to be an academic, as opposed to the portrait of an academic.

Bellow's book is concerned with human relationships among intellectuals, The academy is only significant insofar as it is a good place to find intellectuals to study, a kind of laboratory where the rats can realistically be put through their paces. It is really the friendship between Ravelstein and Chick that is the center of the book. They are in many respects quite different. Ravelstein is at best in the world of ideas, Chick is more at home with the anecdote, the telling incident. Ravelstein speaks his mind refusing to put up with hypocrisy and stupidity; Chick is willing to ignore problems for the sake of equanimity. Ravelstein is concerned with good clothes, good food, fine automobiles; things unimportant to Chick. Yet it seems that it is precisely because they are in so many ways opposite, that their friendship can flourish.

As Ravelstein, the philosopher, explains during a discussion of Plato's theory of Eros, love is in the union of contraries. One looks for one's opposite in order to create a whole, a unity. One might well be reading Percy Shelley on the search of the psyche for the epipsyche. Together, Chick and Ravelstein, form a whole, the one incomplete and unknowable without the other. As Chick says about Ravelstein's request that he write him up after he was gone in his "after-supper-reminiscence manner: " . . since I can't depict him without a certain amount of self-involvement my presence on the margins will have to be tolerated."

His presence, however fills more than mere margins. Everything of Ravelstein we see, we see through the filter of his point of view. If we admire Ravelstein, it is because he admires Ravelstein. If we forgive him his frailties, it is because Chick forgives him his frailties. One is reminded of the controversial intrusion of the author in Edmund Morris's recent biography of Ronald Reagan, Dutch. Yet how is it possible to disagree that in some very significant way the interpreter is a key to what is interpreted.

Bellow goes even further. It is not simply the importance of defining for the reader the point from which the subject is viewed that concerns him, It is the union of the two into the whole that is equally important. It is not insignificant that only once in the novel is Ravelstein's first name, Abe, mentioned, and never that I can remember is Chick's last name given. It is almost as if between the two a new character--a Chick Ravelstein--is created. The whole last section of the book, after Ravelstein's death, deals with Chick and his own near death experience leading to his eventual writing of the memoir. Ravelstein's story is Chick's story. Together Chick and Ravelstein--shades of the doppleganger--are the hero of the book.

The one thing that does not seem to be central to the book is the university, not so in Straight Man. Russo's sights are set squarely on the academic community. Set in West Central Pennsylvania University, Straight Man is a dead on satire, aimed at all the politics, pretensions, and perversities endemic to the lower echelons of higher education, and more than likely the higher echelons as well. Russo, having done time at five such institutions, knows whereof he speaks. Anyone even remotely connected with such an institution will recognize the familiar faces.

William Henry Devereaux, the novel's hero, is an unwilling chairman of a bitterly divided English Department--where is the English Department that is not divided. He has published a mildly successful novel, but has not quite managed another, and the school which had at one time seemed but a temporary stop on the way to a more prestigious career has become the end of the line. He makes up for his own perception of failure with jokes, wisecracks and a refusal to take anything seriously.

He is surrounded by a cast of characters--colleagues, administrators, students--straight from the campus of your own local university: the long haired male feminist who insincerely insists that a woman should be hired even at his own expense( nicknamed Orshee, because he adds "or she" whenever anyone says "he" the campus president (Dicky Pope, whose office is christened The Vatican) who has his head in budgets and public relations rather than education; the lesbian leader of the Women's Studies program, the alcoholic, the failed poet, the. . . and on and on--each one more familiar than the last.

Russo is a master at creating character with simple telling strokes Professor Finny, for example, one of the book's ineffectual antagonists:

Finny was dressed today as he was dressed every day after spring break, in a white linen suit and pink tie that showed off to great advantage his recently acquired Caribbean tan. Several years ago he’d let his white hair grow bushy, then hung a large color portrait of Mark Twain in his office, which he was fond of standing next to.


Pomposity and pretension personified that is Finny, and it is only fitting that the lone goose inhabiting the college duck pond is named by our hero after the white suited professor, and Devereaux is constantly required to distinguish for the reader when he is talking about Finny, the man, and when Finny, the goose.

The plot of the novel is farce without the doors: a nose out of joint after an attack by a spiral note book, failures to hold one's urine and one's breakfast, a threat to kill a duck a day, a host of concealments in an office, a ladies room, a crawl space above a meeting room--and these are only Devereaux' mishaps. The major plot thread concerns the university's lack of funding and budget projections and the impossibility of making adequate arrangements under such circumstances. The irony implicit in all of this is the failure of the university, the supposed seat of reason, to operate on any level with even a modicum of rationality. Irrational farce is the perfect genre for the insane asylum that is academia as painted by Russo.

In an interview on public radio, Russo spoke of Straight Man as a light novel. He explained that the story "The Whore's Child" which gives the name to his most recently published work was originally a part of Straight Man but was edited our because it was too dark and did not fit with the tone of the novel. Yet, if one may disagree ever so slightly with the author, there is an implicit darkness beneath the levity of the book. If after all this is a picture of some of our best and finest, is there not an indictment of someone, something, somewhere.

These are two quite different books, not only in the way they treat Academia, but in almost every other way as well. There is humor in Ravelstein, but it is of the subtle intellectual sort, not the banana peel slapstick of Straight Man. Though the university appears in both, the one gives us the great university, the other the pretender. One is concerned with the life of the mind, the other the social politics of an institution. The irony is that the book least centered on the intellectual institution is the book most directly concerned with the intellect and the mind.

Mamet Converts

Article first published as David Mamet Converts on Blogcritics.

Playwright David Mamet's recently announced conversion from the wrong-headed liberalism of his youth to a new clear eyed conservativism, has garnered a good deal of publicity as one would expect from such a political about face from such a well known and controversial figure. This after all is the man who for much of his career was unable to write a line of dialogue without resorting to at least one of those "expletives deleted," formerly anathema to so many of his new conservative cohorts, so his conversion, even though he couldn't quite manage it without at least one of those choice expletives, comes as something of a gift from heaven. Presuming that is that he at some point pays homage to family values by forswearing swearing. Ordinary sinners entering the fold are all well and good, but there is nothing like a conversion of note to bring joy to the heart of the faithful.

On the other hand, there is something of a cliché at work here. Liberal youthful idealism giving way to conservativism in middle or old age is not exactly an unusual occurrence. My own favorite example is the English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. As a young man, Wordsworth was a vocal supporter of what would have been considered ultra radical causes. He was passionate, for example, in his support of the French Revolution. He wrote glowingly of the common man in the language of the common man. While he may not have been as radical in his thinking as say Shelley, he was clearly a believer in liberal values. But as he grew older, he began to change. His politics and his religious ideas became more and more conventional, more and more conservative. Eventually, his thinking became so hide abound that it was said he refused to look at the news papers.
The interesting thing is that for a long time it was conventional thinking among literary critics, leftist liberals by definition some would say, that Wordsworth deteriorated as a poet the more conservative he became. All of his really great poetry was written pretty much before 1810. He still wrote a good bit of poetry after, most of it goes unread. While this may be little more than the institutional bias of progressive academics, it is hard to find anything in the later poetry to equal masterpieces like "Tintern Abbey" and "The Intimations Ode." Of course, this may well have more to do with youth than it does with politics, but it is something for an artist to think about.

Now certainly, as Mamet himself affirms, it is an honorable act to change one's mind when the facts show that one has been wrong. Certainly one can change one's mind even when the facts show nothing of the kind. This is a free country. Liberals can see the new conservative light, and conservatives can close their Milton Friedmans and open their John Kenneth Galbraiths. And they do, especially late in life. An artist like Mamet, however, may well want to give some thought to the experience of Wordsworth. Will there be any more dramatic masterworks like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross or are we destined to see Mamet's equivalent of Ecclesiastical Sonnets?

The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith

Sometimes you have to wonder if Smith's novels should really be classified as mysteries; if there is any mystery here it is in the workings of human nature. Solutions to questions raised come from outside more often than they do to any investigative work by philosopher queen Isabel Dalhousie. And for a philosopher, she is certainly very quick to jump to conclusions and make judgments on the slightest of evidence.



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Book Review: Misfortune, Wesley Stace

This article was first published at The Compulsive Reader:


There have been many fine novels written exploring the theme of confused sexual identity. From Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Jeffrey Eugenides Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex, novelists have used the theme to raise questions about conventional notions of what is normal and to suggest that ideas about gender are as much functions of societal pressures as they are biologically determined.

Wesley Stace’s debut novel Misfortune is one more attempt to mine this same field. Set in England in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Misfortune tells the story of Rose Loveall, a foundling boy raised as a girl by an eccentric, effeminate nobleman. Discovered a few hours after his birth on a dust heap in the outskirts of London, the baby is rescued by Lord Geoffroy Loveall. Loveall is unmarried, has never shown any sign of any interest in women and is in danger of failing to provide an heir to his estate and title. Moreover the death of his younger sister when they were both children has left him traumatized, and he is still in mourning for her. He sees in the foundling a substitute for his beloved sister, and without bothering to ascertain the actual sex of the child, he announces him as his daughter. Even when the truth is discovered, he insists on his delusion.

He persuades his sister’s governess who has remained with the family as a librarian to marry him and pass off the baby as their daughter. She agrees, thinking that as the child grows older, they will acknowledge the truth about the baby’s sex. For one reason or another that truth is never revealed, and Rose reaches puberty with not only the rest of the world believing he is a girl, but believing it himself. His eventual discovery of his masculinity after his father’s death paralyzes him with conflicting emotions. He finds himself unable to deal with all the problems raised by the revelation, retreats into himself, and finally runs away.

That Rose has managed to grow into his early teens without any accurate idea of the physical differences between the sexes is something of a stretch even given the repressive modesties of Victorian England. True his education was strictly controlled by his mother, his contacts with other children and the rest of the world restricted. Still he did have playmates, He did notice differences in the bathroom habits of the brother and sister who were his constant companions. He did note that his own physical makeup was much more like that of the boy than the girl. Moreover, he lived on a country estate where there were horses and other farm animals. The idea that in some fifteen years he had never come across the differences between the male and female anatomies is difficult to accept.

Even if the reader is willing to buy into Rose’s naivete, he leaves much to be desired as the central figure and narrator as well of a five hundred page novel. When he finally recognizes that he is a male, his problem seems tp be ,more with his clothes than with his sexuality. Men’s clothing fells awkward. It is stiff. It chafes. This is surprising considering the restraints of women’s apparel in the Victorian era. He has grown used to his dresses and needs them complete his image of himself. It is not that he wants to be female. It is not that he wants to pass as female. He is neither a trans sexual nor a transvestite. He wants to be a man, identifiable as a man, but dressed in female garb. He wants to wear the dress in the family.

The hot house environment in which this rose was raised had left him a passive character, easily cowed by others, incapable of standing up for himself. Faced with a flock of self serving family members out for their own gain after the death of his father, he allows them to take over his house. He looks to his mother and the faithful of his servants to save him and when they cannot, he uses his depression over the revelation of his sexuality to excuse his inaction. He turns completely inward at the crisis. In the end his solution is to run away and debase himself (although the period of that debasement is omitted from the novel and the nature of the defilement is only hinted at). Now while the passive acceptance of victimhood may well be a result of his upbringing, it is not likely to result in an engaging hero.

This kind of paralyzed hero is much more characteristic of the modern novel than it is if the Victorian. The Marxist critic, George Lukacs, has identified this kind of kind of character overwhelmed by the problems of the modern world as one of the major problems of the modern novel. Characters in nineteenth century novels seem much more able to deal with their world. They may falter for a time, but in the end they will generally overcome. And, if not, they will at least try. They will not sit by passively and allow themselves to be abused. Rose Loveall seems to belong more to the modern world than he does to the world in which he lives.

Even the voice in which he narrates the story has a modern ironic tone. First person narrators in nineteenth century fiction tend to be sincere and direct. They don’t generally set themselves up as authors discussing the art of narrative. Third person narrators may do so–Thackeray allowing his omniscient voice to discuss the manipulation of his puppets in "Vanity Fair,: for example, but this kind of ironic distancing is absent from first person narrators like Jane Eyre or Nellie Dean. Rose, on the other hand, is perfectly willing to comment on the narrative from the distance. There is a long passage when he begins his first person narrative where he explains why the beginning of the story was told from the omniscient point of view:

I should apologize for not revealing myself in the first volume, which I chose not to tell in my own voice. ‘Why,’ you may ask, ‘when you are so very first person now?’ The answer is simple: There was no I. And if there was an I, that little baby passed from hand to paw, there wasn’t enough of an I with which to speak, or see. I didn’t think my own voice would be persuasive enough, so I opted for the old-fashioned narrator, the All-Seeing One–or let’s call him God.". . . It was I who made the first line of this confession, but when I read it to myself in His voice(deep, echoing), even I believed it. Print, too, is very persuasive–. . . .

I have an entirely different style from God. I deal only in the truth, that is, the truth as I witnessed it. If I had written the foregoing part in my own voice, I would have been covering, waiting for what I knew and making up the rest. . . . MY intention
was to convey you to this point with the minimum of fuss, to have you trust in what you were reading. I needed God, so I put him to work for me.

Of course, I also spoke with my own voice–for even God, however neutral He pretends to be, must commit a little of Himself.


This kind of subversive meta-narrative further emphasizes the modernity of the novel’s central character. Sometimes the narrative intrusion is simply a kind of flippant aside, as in the narrator’s wish for a family tree in the front of the volume in order to keep the members of the clan straight. Sometimes it makes little sense as in the explanation for the omission of the year of degradation, because he knew his mother would somehow feel responsible. Were that the case why even give the hints which were certainly explicit enough to make her feel guilty? While these authorial comments may be few, they are intrusive and call undue attention to themselves.

The plot itself is complex with a lot of seeming coincidences and a few real coincidences. The characters tend to be either black or white. The good ones are good and the bad, evil, with very few in between. And in some cases they are indeed difficult to keep track of (even with the wished for family tree). The chronology of events is also difficult to keep in mind as is the age of the growing Rose since few points of reference are given. While there are some truly effective individual scenes, mainly erotic ones, they do not in themselves provide sufficient reward for wading through the pages of Rose’s history.

Music Review: Brigadoon-Studio Cast Recording (1957)

Article first published as Music Review: Brigadoon - Studio Cast Recording (1957) on Blogcritics.

Of the many recordings of Fredrick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner's 1947 musical fantasy Brigadoon, the 1957 Studio Cast recording starring Shirley Jones fresh from her acclaimed performance in Oklahoma! and husband Jack Cassidy is considered one of the best. Advanced recording technology allowed the inclusion of more of the Loewe's music than the original cast album and the '54 soundtrack from the MGM feature starring Gene Kelley and Cyd Charisse, certainly more known for dancing, is more focused on the film's dance elements. Masterworks Broadway's recent digital re-release of the '57 album, then comes as a welcome opportunity to add one of the classic musical comedy scores to your iTunes library.

While Brigadoon may be less well known than a show like My Fair Lady which has become a staple of the straw hat circuit and community theatres, it features a magical story coupled with some fine music, the equal of any of the duo's other work. Set in Scotland, the book tells the story of two American tourists, in an age before GPS, lost in the highlands, who come across a strange town nowhere visible on Google Maps which seems to appear mythically from the Scottish mists. There is a joyous fair in progress, and one of the lost tourists, Tommy Albright, played by Cassidy, meets a local girl, Fiona MacLaren (Shirley Jones), and of course they fall in love. The town is preparing to celebrate the wedding of Charlie Dalrymple (Frank Porretta) and Fiona's younger sister, and when Tommy sees Charlie date his signature in the family Bible 1746 coupled with the villager's seeming lack of knowledge of many of the conveniences of modern life, it is clear Brigadoon is no ordinary place. It turns out that as the result of an ancient prayer to save the villagers from the evils of the world, the village vanished into the highland mist, and appears again for one day every hundred years. If any of the villagers leave, the spell will be broken, so as the day draws to its close, Tommy must choose between the woman he loves and returning to the modern world.

Probably the best known song from the show is the duet in which Tommy and Fiona describe their day together, "Almost Like Being in Love." But if it is the best known, it is only one of a number of beautiful ballads scattered through the show. Frank Porretta's operatic tenor is featured in the elegant "Come to Me, Bend to Me," a version you can compare with Adam Lambert's over the top take on the tune." From This Day On" and "There But for You Go I" showcase Cassidy at his romantic best. "The Heather on The Hill" is a sweet duet for the budding lovers, Tommy and Fiona. Porretta and the chorus do a rousing turn in the infectious "I'll Go Home with Bonnie Jean." Susan Johnson, best known for her performance in The Most Happy Fella, has a bravura patter song in "My Mother's Wedding Day." It is a score filled with many delights that have not gone stale with time.

Book Review:The Bronte Myth, Lucasta Miller

This article was first published at The Compulsive Reader.


“Virginia Woolf came to the conclusion that the facts of biography ‘are not like the facts of science–once they are discovered, always the same. They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as times change.’” This observation quoted from Lucasta Miller’s study of the ever changing image of the Bronte sisters may well serve as both a motto and the raison d’etre for her work. She is not so much concerned with getting at some ultimate truth of who the Bronte sisters were, what they were like, why they were able to accomplish so much, what it was that made them tick; that would be nice were it possible. The problem is that it is not possible. Most of the factual information is missing, but even if it were available, even if there were diaries and an abundance of letters and detailed reports of contemporaries, all that information would still be subject to vagaries of the biographer’s interpretation and the fashions of the day.

What is not possible is an objective portrait of the artist. What is possible is an examination of what other biographers and writers have done to try to determine just what their biases, cultural and individual may have been, to measure what they have done against the facts available, to see clearly the myth they have created.

And myth there has been aplenty.

Beginning with Charlotte’s own “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell” which she wrote for the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights where she tried to defend her sister against the charges of coarseness by painting her as a country mouse unschooled in the ways of the more cultivated society. She allowed her readers the impression that Emily had never been beyond the Yorkshire moors that dominate the melancholy setting of her novel. She doesn’t mention that Emily accompanied her to Belgium, for example. Charlotte had an agenda, and she suited her portrait to that agenda.

Miller points out that the same can be said for Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell in her famous biography of Charlotte herself. Mrs. Gaskell, Miller argues, typically Victorian in her attitudes towards women and their role in society, was uncomfortable with the notion that a woman author could be solely a woman author, and this despite the fact that she was a well known novelist and critic herself. The Mrs. is the key. A woman may be a writer, but she must be a wife as well and a mother if possible. In her biography, she found it necessary to turn charlotte into a home body, a characteristic Victorian angel in the house, busy with all the little household chores and duties that filled the lives of ‘normal’ nineteenth century housewives. If she wrote novels, she did so in her spare time. Husband and family must be foremost in her life.

She created a Charlotte Bronte to meet her own expectations, as well as those of her contemporaries. She was more interested in Charlotte Bronte, the woman, than in Charlotte the novelist. She paints a picture of saintly woman giving up of herself to do her duty in the home, and it is this picture that gained currency through most of the rest of the nineteenth century. There is the story, for example, of the elderly servant who had grown too short sighted to peel potatoes adequately, and the selfless Charlotte breaking off from her writing to redo the peeling which Miller quotes from a collection of nineteenth century lives of women, Women of Worth (1859) to show the influence of Mrs. Gaskell’s work: “Every menial office in the establishment was exacted of the children, not more as a matter of necessity than of duty, and Charlotte continued to discharge them all until the year before her death, with the force of habit and the penchant of liking. Grates were scoured, furniture scrubbed, beds tossed, floors washed and swept, bread baked, and all sorts of plain cooking, done by these little, quiet, heartbroken-looking children, who did every one of the same things daily after they became celebrated women.”

This picture only began to change when the discovery of Charlotte’s letters to the Belgian schoolmaster, M. Heger, whom she fictionalized in her novel, Villette, was made. At that point and under the influence of the newly fashionable Freudian ideas about personality development, the portrait of Charlotte began to grow somewhat less saintly. The feminist revolution in the middle of the twentieth century marked still another change in the picture. For feminist critics and biographers, Charlotte was a woman ahead of her time and a victim to the prejudices of the society in which she lived. Post feminist criticism tended see her less as a victim and more as a forerunner of the modern woman–a feminist in the making. In essence, Miller shows that critics and biographers have cut Charlotte to fit the pattern of their preconceptions and created a woman that more than likely never really existed.

The same is true of Emily, and perhaps even more so, because there is even less factual material available–the less information, the easier to speculate, the easier to invent. Emily was the most reclusive of the sisters. Unlike Charlotte and Anne, she never seemed to seek the public eye; she never went out into the London literary society, dined with Thackeray or Mrs. Gaskell, corresponded with publishers and editors. Few letters are extant. Much of what we know about her comes from her novel and the juvenile tales she wrote together with Anne. And while there is much to be learned about a writer from her work, it is only too easy–and often only too wrong–to read biography from fiction.

If Charlotte began as the angel in the house, Emily was something quite different. She had produced a novel quite wild and unwomanly. Jane Eyre might have been a bit coarse, but Wuthering Heights was well nigh demonic. It was almost impossible to believe that a woman could have written such a disturbing book. Surely no woman could have done so–a more likely candidate was needed, and for many, one reared his head–the impassioned, alcoholic Bronte brother, Branwell. Surely he was more likely to have been the model for much of the book. Model? More likely he collaborated in its creation. Collaborated? Why not written it? This kind of wild speculation was characteristic of much of the work on Emily during the nineteenth century.

Later writers more impressed with her novel tended to focus on her literary forebears–seeing her novel as a result of her art rather than an imitation of her life experience or the experience of those around her. As more of her work became available–her poetry and the Gondal sagas– the Byronic elements and the Romantic mystical qualities began to be emphasized.

Like Charlotte, she became what her biographers and critics wanted her to be.

Lucasta Miller has written a well documented–every chapter has over a hundred footnotes–study of the Brontes as they have been perceived over the decades in scholarly works, in popular fiction and film, by academics and artists, by critics and editors. All too often these perceptions have been created out of whole cloth with little if anything to substantiate them.

One particular incident she mentions deserves note as an emblem of the Bronte myth and as perhaps the “greatest biographical gaffe in the history of Bronte studies.” Virginia Moore, in her 1936 biography, The Life and Eager Death of Emily Bronte claimed to have paid “special and respectful attention to primary sources.” In doing so, however, she had great difficulty with the crabbed handwriting of her manuscript sources and misread the title of the poem, “Love’s Farewell,” as “Louis Parensell.” From this she deduced a preciously unknown lover of that name. And although the editor of the poetry corrected the error in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, “the mythic Louis went on to spend a speculative existence in the letters page of the Poetry Review.”