Literature as a family product is fairly uncommon, writers of any quality at all usually coming one to a household. Anthony Trollope and his mother, les freres Goncourt, Papa Dumas et Fils are probably the best known lesser lights. Henry, William and Alice James are certainly the most spectacular American instance. But for the most dramatic and poignant family group in the whole corpus of literary biography, we always come back to Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, the novel-writing daughters of an Anglo-Irish clergyman who lived, yearned and scribbled on the Yorkshire moors a little over one hundred years ago.
Their mother had died when they were infants. Their home was a chilly, curtainless parsonage with rain-dark gravestones under the windows. The winters were long and bitter, their health was poor, and besides their cantankerous father, they had to attend the morose ego of a frustrated, Gin drinking brother, Branwell. Yet their shared childhood was golden. They all had that quality of imagination that inhabits but is never limited by the flesh; and so, they spent most of their time in elaborately furnished daydreams where beauty, gallantry and high purpose flourished as freely as heather in the spring.
Comments