7/5/2023 0 Comments The bronte myth![]() ![]() Four siblings and a widowed father in an isolated parsonage on the edge of a Yorkshire moor? I was hooked, like so many before me, by the “Brontë Myth.” I read the other novels too-Charlotte’s and Anne’s-and dabbled in Brontë poetry, but my first real meeting with the family was thanks to Lynn Reid Banks’s biography, Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës. There were academics, I discovered, who spent their entire lives writing essays on Brontë and the “twin motif.” It was the first text I examined from a feminist lens and a Marxist one. In high school, we studied Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the novel served as a different kind of introduction, this time to literary criticism. I already knew that, if I were in Jane’s place, I’d choose to live with Rochester in sin. I didn’t want to believe that adults could remain on life’s peripheries. When I pictured being grown up, I was a Blanche Ingram, attending parties and flaunting new dresses. My days were spent bickering or playing with my sister, but she was absolutely alone. She hated her school, while I loved mine. ![]() Jane was relatable and unrelatable all at once. My sister hid under the covers at the “romantic bits.” I hung over the edge of the top bunk to beg for another chapter. I first “met” the Brontës when my mother read my younger sister and me Jane Eyre. ![]() The Brontë Myth: why this literary family continues to inspire writers today ![]()
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