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Overview
Upon its publication in 1995, Juliet Barker's The Brontës was deemed a monumental achievement that set a new standard in literary biography; it garnered rave reviews and was cited as a New York Times Notable Book of 1995 and a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 1995. In The Brontës: A Life in Letters, the much anticipated follow-up to that landmark biography, Barker uses newly discovered letters and manuscripts, some appearing in print for the first time, to reveal the authentic voices of the three novelist sisters. The letters detail the siblings' self-absorbed childhood, highlighted by wild, imaginative games; the years of struggling to earn a living in uncongenial occupations before they took the literary world by storm; the terrible marring of that success as Branwell, Emily, and Anne died tragically young; the final years as Charlotte, battling against grief, loneliness, and ill health, emerged from anonymity to take her place in literary society.In The Brontës: A Life in Letters, Juliet Barker has produced a work of impeccable scholarship but also a story as dramatic, and undeniably readable as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
"Barker proves herself an impeccable editor of family papers we are all the richer for possessing." (New York Times Book Review)
"Provides a real sense of what those strange, brilliant people were like." (The Atlantic Monthly)
Editorials
Atlantic Monthly
The Brontes: A Life in Letters provides a real sense of what those strange, brilliant people were like.Atlantic Monthly
Provides a real sense of what those strange,brilliant people were like—simultaneously withdrawn from life and passionately interested in it.New York Times Book Review
Barker proves herself an impeccable editor of family papers we are all the richer for possessing.Booknews
Collects the correspondence of the three novelist sisters as well as their brother and father. The bulk of the letters are from Charlotte, since few of the letters of Emily and Anne are extant. The letters are addressed to publishers, writers including William Wordsworth, suitors, editors, members of the clergy, academics, and friends. Includes a chronology of the writers' lives.The New Yorker
Bronte chroniclers have always been simultaneously fascinated by the family's remarkable letters and frustrated by the Victorian horror of personal publicity. Much of the correspondence was dispersed, defaced, or burned, and until this decade the only collection was a haphazard and sprawling affair. Barker's judicious scholarship finally clears the way for us to hear the Brontes tell their own tales.Diane Cole
Juliet Barker, who wrote the biography The Brontes, provides a gripping documentary chronicle of this extraordinarily brilliant and insular family. . . -- New York Times Book ReviewBook Details
Published
March 1, 1998
Publisher
Woodstock, N.Y. : Overlook Press, 1998, c1997.
Pages
448
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780879518387