Chitham's Emily and Freeman's Charlotte

A revised edition of a well known biography and a late addition to the Brontë biofiction madness:

A fully revised new edition of Edward Chitham’s best-selling biography
A Life of Emily Brontë
Edward Chitham
Amberley Publishing
July 2010
ISBN: 9781848684065
Format: Paperback

Biographical material on Emily Brontë is scarce. In the past, biographers have taken this as an excuse to portray intuition as fact, creating a confused and inaccurate image of the author who wrote Wuthering Heights. In A Life of Emily Brontë, Edward Chitham rejects wholeheartedly the temptation to validate speculation. He describes his book as an ‘investigative biography’, delving into Emily’s childhood, her relationships with her family, her father’s Irish roots, and the influences conveyed by friends and acquaintances. Using material neglected by other biographers, Chitham makes an illuminating and scholarly study of the events and characters that shaped Emily’s inspiration; a puzzle that has confounded many and made her, up to this point, an enigmatic and misrepresented figure.

Brontë in Love
By Sarah Freeman
Publication Date: September 2010
Great Northern Books
ISBN: 9781905080700

When Charlotte Brontë died at the age of 38 in the Haworth parsonage where she had spent most of her life, her reputation as one of English literature’s great novelists was already assured. In Jane Eyre she had allowed passion and romance to triumph over staid Victorian convention. She had written of fiery emotion, of heartbreak and of madness, but the greatest and at times the most tragic love story she never told was her own.
It is this story that is now related in this compelling read. Here is the saga of a hopeless romantic, who naively believed true love could always conquer all. As a teenager she penned endless torrid romances and her hero was not a gentlemanly pillar of the community, but the Duke of Zamorna who had two wives, numerous mistresses and an illegitimate child.
Brought vividly to life in these pages are the parallels with Charlotte’s own life. By the time she was twenty-three she had rejected two proposals of marriage, one from a man she had known for only a couple of hours. Not for another fifteen turbulent years – marked by another proposal and two passionate affairs – were her childhood dreams finally extinguished. One June morning she walked into her father’s church in Haworth and married a man she didn't love. Arthur Nicholls was neither dashing, nor ruggedly handsome, but he cared deeply for Charlotte and she finally realised companionship was more important than the idealistic passion she had gone searching for all those years before. It seemed she had at last found the one thing she wanted most of all, but within nine months both she and her unborn child were dead.

Categories: Biography, Books, Fiction