Cruelty

A recent book featuring the Brontës:

Fracture

Stories of How Great Lives Take Root in Trauma

Matthew Parris

Profile Books

ISBN: 9781781257234

Ada Lovelace. Frederick Douglass. Vladimir Lenin. Marie Curie. Frieda Kahlo. Carl Jung. Tupac Shakur. All geniuses who changed the world in ways that still influence our lives today. And all men and women who experienced, in childhood, trauma so severe that it should have broken them completely.

While presenting Great Lives on Radio 4, Matthew Parris noticed a trend in the lives of the exceptional people the programme covered: many of them had been marked by extreme trauma and deprivation. They seemed to have succeeded not only in spite of their backgrounds, but perhaps even because of them.

As Matthew Parris brings each individual's story to life in this original and compelling study, it becomes clear that we must rethink the origins of success, as well as the legacy of trauma.

Chapter 5 is about Cruelty and features, among others, the Brontë sisters. The Times reviews the book:

Even harsher conditions are claimed to instil a fiercer spirit of revolt in the Brontë brood, who are treated here as one subject. The death of their mother left Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne in the care of their “dutiful but distant” clergyman father, who broke their happy childhood of imaginative play by sending them to a nightmarish school, where the food was spoilt and sparse, and the dormitories cold and dirty. Maria and Elizabeth did not survive this education. For Emily particularly, Parris writes, “this was an experience which fundamentally shook her belief in the justice of the world”, unleashing the moral ambivalence that animates her intense fiction.(...)
Parris’s focus on individuals can obscure the communal nature of genius. Would a single Brontë have become a writer without the shared games of their childhood? (Sarah Ditum)