The quest for Doreen Brontë

Michael Wharton, best known as his alter ego, Peter Simple, died last January 24. He, according to his obituary, was among the most widely read British satirical writers of the 20th century. Under the name Peter Simple, his writings appeared four times a week in The Daily Telegraph from 1957 for more than forty years.

His style was controversial:
His daily offering of delightfully reactionary items will long provide invaluable source material for social historians as a critique of the various fads of the late 20th century. The people and causes that he lampooned in his “Way of the World” column — feminists, feather-brained bien-pensants, pseudo-Marxists, race relations experts, trendy vicars, bone-headed hacks — were those that grated on the sensibilities of many Britons, whose instincts were that the old ways were usually best.

But of course, this is not the reason because his death appears in Brontë news (check, for instance here). He was also the creator of Julian Birdbath, the author of "The quest for Doreen Brontë":

Needless to say, Julian Birdbath dealt with it fully in his seminal book The Quest for Doreen Bronte, one of the greatest of all feats of literary detection, in which he revealed the existence of a "missing Bronte sister", Doreen, as well as further conjectural Bronte sisters, Dawn, Linda and Karen, and even two missing Bronte brothers, Barry and Wayne.
Needless to say, his work has been suppressed by a conspiracy of Bronte experts, possibly part of a wider conspiracy, who, whether from jealousy or motiveless malice, have systematically blotted out all knowledge of it. Now, reduced to penury, Birdbath lives on No 2 Level, Deadwater Leadmine (disused), near Bakewell, with only his pet toad, Amiel, for company and little to eat except old review copies.

Doreen Bronte, he revealed, was a very different character from her literary sisters. A brusque, mannish, pipe-smoking, practical woman, she was mainly interested in science and technology, especially ballistics (she invented a machine-gun which anticipated Maxim). She also worked on sociological studies, striding about the moors and carrying out surveys of class and racial discrimination in the Haworth area.

Tiring of this monotonous life, she left for America some time in the 1840s and passed out of history (though she may have fought on the Union side of the Civil War and later worked on telecommunications under the name of Edison Bell).

As Birdbath discovered, she left behind at Haworth a mass of papers on various subjects. Coming across these after her departure, Charlotte, Emily and Anne worked them up into the romantic novels we know.

If you want to read more of this fascinating story, just click here. There are several other columns available at the Daily Telegraph website just as hilarious as this one.

Categories: In_the_News, Weirdo