James also once complained that the reader of Balzac (whom he admired above all novelists) is occasionally in danger of being "suffocated" by "things" or having his "mouth stopped by a choking dose of bricks and mortar," and there's a bit of that here too. Juliet Barker has clearly saturated herself in her material in the most honorable way - for 11 years, apparently. Henry James used to prescribe "saturation" for the writer, meaning both that he should be soaked in his material and that his writing should bear all the signs of that happy immersion. The justification for this almost unmanageably large book is that it is "the first definitive history" of the entire Bronte family.Ĭertainly it would be a brave biographer who tried to supplant this prodigious compilation, and it is hard to imagine how it could be superseded. Peering fore and aft, one sees an oceanic text of some 900 more pages (including almost 150 pages of notes) stretching out to the horizon. This means that the most significant period of the Brontes' lives - certainly as writers - is covered in just over 100 pages. In between the two dates, the major Bronte novels were written and published and Emily and Branwell died. ON page 491 of this massive work, the Bronte sisters publish - at their own expense - their first book, "Poems," in 1846. THE BRONTES By Juliet Barker.Illustrated.
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