The Bronte Myth - Softcover

"A brilliant and riveting examination of the Bronte phenomenon" (Daily Mail)

"Brilliant...written with wit and relish, and packed with irresistible detail" (The Times)

"Sharply intelligent, original and witty... Literary history is seldom related with such a pleasant combination of brio and erudition" (Sunday Times)

"Crisply written and witty... Lucasta Miller...sends the reader straight back to the wonderful novels that inspired such hommages" (Michele Roberts Independent on Sunday)

"A sharp-witted study in literary reputation... Miller supplies a deft and immaculately detailed tracing of the many 'constructions' of Charlotte Bronte" (Joanna Griffiths Observer)

Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Brontë 'biography' appearing. These range from pious accounts in Victorian conduct books to Freudian pyschobiographies, from plays, films and ballets to tourist brochures and images on tea-towels, from sensation-seeking penny-a-liners to meticulous works of sober scholarship. Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality.

The Brontë Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture and Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontës themselves.