'THE BRONT & euml; MYTH' | A review A scholarly look at sisters' shifting literary reputation

The Bront & euml; sisters' work was considered trashy in the Victorian era.
By CHARLES MATTHEWS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"The Bront & euml; Myth," by Lucasta Miller (Knopf, $26.95)
You probably think of "Jane Eyre" as the kind of novel you'd feel safe in recommending to a 12-year-old girl (if you know a 12-year-old girl who'd read a novel about a Victorian governess instead of the latest dish about Paris Hilton).
But as the British critic Lucasta Miller tells us in her provocative history of the reputation of the Bront & euml; sisters and their work, when Charlotte Bront & euml;'s novel was published in 1847, readers were shocked, shocked by it (which means, naturally, that it sold a lot of copies). It was vilified with those curious Victorian epithets "coarse" and "morbid" -- indications that it was sexier and psychologically more unsettling than the readers were used to.
Charlotte wasn't the only Bront & euml; to shock the Victorians. Anne, now the least famous of the sisters, may have caused the most scandal with her novel "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," because it took direct aim at the subjugation of women -- the novel's heroine flees from her marriage to a dissolute and abusive man. The author was denounced for a "morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal" and the book was called "revolting."
Nor did Emily's "Wuthering Heights" escape charges of morbid coarseness. It was also called "too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers." But the Victorians seem to have found the high passions and narrative intricacies of that great mad book as much puzzling as offensive; it didn't achieve full recognition as a classic until the 20th century, when Emily's reputation began to eclipse Charlotte's and the novel's ironies and ambiguities came in vogue.
The novels were published under male pseudonyms -- Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell -- but even when it became known that the Bells were really the Bronte sisters the criticism was not modulated.
Apologies
The criticism took a toll on Charlotte, especially in the terrible months from September 1848 to May 1849 that saw the deaths of her brother, Branwell, and her sisters. In 1850, Charlotte decided to memorialize her sisters by reprinting "Wuthering Heights" and Anne's novel "Agnes Grey," along with a selection of their poems, and to preface them with a "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell."
As Miller observes, the tone of the "Biographical Notice" is apologetic in the extreme: "To clear her sisters of the charge of coarseness, she presented them as a couple of simple, uneducated country girls who did not really know what they were doing. ... She argued that her sisters were innocent girls, inhabitants of a 'remote district where education had made little progress."'
And that was the beginning of what Miller calls "the Bront & euml; myth," furthered by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose biography, "The Life of Charlotte Bront & euml;," appeared in 1857, two years after Charlotte's death.
Whole new spin
Gaskell's biography succeeded in putting a whole new spin on Charlotte's life, and it colored the reaction to her novels. "Jane Eyre" had been adapted for the stage in the late 1840s and 1850s; these versions "tended to remain close to Charlotte's original conception of her heroine, emphasizing Jane's spirited independence." But after Gaskell's biography became a best seller, the stage adaptations turned Jane "into a saintly exemplar of conventional feminine virtue" -- a characterization that was still with us when Joan Fontaine played Jane in the 1944 movie version.
Gaskell's portrait of Charlotte had another unintended consequence: turning her into a respectable Victorian woman caused a backlash when the revolt against Victorian values came in the early 20th century. Charlotte's siblings -- especially the alcoholic, opium-addicted Branwell and the strange, shy Emily -- took on a glamour that she now lacked. Emily's "Wuthering Heights" ascended in critical reputation as "Jane Eyre" declined.
It took the feminist critics of the '70s -- who have clearly influenced Miller -- to rehabilitate Charlotte, sweeping away the veils of respectability in which Gaskell had draped her and rediscovering the passionate, independent author of "Jane Eyre." One of the key works of feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's "The Madwoman in the Attic," elevated Mr. Rochester's mad wife, Bertha, into a symbol of the repression of women.
Covering it all
Miller covers all of the oscillations of the Bront & euml;s' reputation. They have been sentimentalized and sensationalized in movies, plays, novels and hack biographies, which Miller describes in often amusing detail. And they have been the subjects of febrile psychoanalyzing and wacky theories about their lives and books -- such as the undying claim that Branwell was the "real" author of "Wuthering Heights," which, Miller says, shows "how Victorian prejudices about writing and gender could be powerful enough to inspire men to try to erase the literary reputation of a woman."
"The Bront & euml; Myth" is a first-rate work of scholarship and criticism, and a surprisingly entertaining read. And thanks to Miller's clearheadedness, it seems unlikely that the Bront & euml;s will ever again be marginalized into the spooky spinsters of the myth.