'Yet another biography of the Brontës requires an apology, or at least an explanation," Juliet Barker writes in her introduction. Actually, the explanation is quite simple: The previous biographers were wrong, and Barker is right.
Brontë biography, in Barker's view, is a perpetuation of error. Read her 150 or so pages of notes, and you will see that she lines up her predecessors only to mow them down. They simply haven't done their homework -- such as reading the local papers and using the most authoritative texts of the novels. Instead, they repeat one another's errors. And they accept too much of the story as Elizabeth Gaskell, the first Brontë biographer, invented it: a grim parsonage presided over by a dour father, a wastrel son, and long-suffering daughters isolated from civilization, but somehow able to tap into their own creative reserves and produce world-famous novels.
But wait! Haven't I heard this before? Ah, yes, in Lucasta Miller's recent "The Brontë Myth." But wait! There's also Angus Mason Mackay's "The Brontës: Fact and Fiction," first published in 1897. Even Gaskell revised and corrected many of her initial impressions. For that is what biography is: gradual correction of error and accumulation of insight built on the work of others. Even Barker relies on Gaskell's narrative in some instances. Yet in Barker's view, biographers are like Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights -- thrown into a situation that quite overmasters them.
Of course, Juliet Barker is one of the supreme authorities on the Brontës. And it is fascinating to watch her correct and add to the record. But too often she is an absolutist. Thus she doubts that Anne's poetry is autobiographical because Emily was writing similar lines at the same time. Why does it have to be either/or? Why does Barker continually ask questions that are really putdowns of previous biographers? No doubt, there has been bad work done on the Brontës, and that needs to be shown up. But the result is that Barker herself sometimes narrows rather than expands our sense of who these complex figures were.
Treat this book as an exceptionally well informed -- indeed, encyclopedic -- authority. But do not for a moment think that this is the Brontë Bible, or the last word on the subject.
Carl Rollyson is co-author, with Lisa Paddock, of "The Brontës: A to Z."
