In the last decade and a half, a new genre of scholarship has begun to flourish. You could give it a fancy name like biographical deconstruction, but what it amounts to, simply, is this: a reappraisal of how successive generations of critics, biographers and fans mythologize the achievements and life stories of iconic artists.
Gary Taylor's groundbreaking 1989 book ''Reinventing Shakespeare'' examined how the playwright's image has been continually reinvented, with Restoration critics depicting him as a dramatic poet addressing historical and political issues, Victorians stressing his virtuosic range and modernists touting the ambiguities in his work.
William Stafford's 1991 book ''The Mozart Myths'' looked at how scholars have revised their predecessors' findings, selecting and amplifying material that might support their own pet theories about the composer, depicting him, variously, as a childish victim, a Romantic genius and an Enlightenment rebel. And A. Richard Turner's ''Inventing Leonardo'' (1993) showed how scholars have tried to reimagine the painter and thinker in their own images, turning him into a mirror of changing cultural values and evolving theories of creativity.
The latest example of this compelling genre is Lucasta Miller's absorbing new book, ''The Brontë Myth,'' a work that attempts ''to trace the historical route'' by which Charlotte and Emily Brontë (and to a lesser degree, Anne) became popular cultural icons, and ''to show how years of cultural accretion have shifted the sisters' position in the collective consciousness from the level of history onto that of myth.''
Although the book is heavily indebted to recent Brontë scholarship (most notably Lyndall Gordon's superb 1994 biography ''Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life''), Ms. Miller writes with such lucidity, wit and plain common sense that she is able to shed new light on the Brontës and the Brontë industry, while at the same time raising important questions about changing fashions in biography writing and academic scholarship.
She shows how Victorian hagiography and recent feminist analysis alike have obscured the Brontës' identities as individual artists, and how their work has frequently been overshadowed by their public personas, most notably the Victorian image of Charlotte as a long-suffering domestic saint and the early 20th-century image of Emily as a waifish free spirit, wandering the windswept moors.
Ms. Miller, a former deputy literary editor at The Independent in Britain, also proves herself adept -- and often quite funny -- at chronicling the varieties of Brontë mania that have surfaced over the years, and at detailing the narcissistic efforts of scholars and readers to turn the sisters into avatars of their own ideologies and complaints.
As some earlier biographers have noted, many of the most enduring ideas about the Brontës were rooted in Charlotte's own conflicted feelings about herself and her projection of a demure, ladylike persona to deflect attacks from people who found her novel ''Jane Eyre'' immoral, subversive or morbid. Craving social acceptance as a lady and uncomfortable about her new fame as a writer, Ms. Miller writes, Charlotte tended to hide aspects of her personality from the public: ''Her humor, her passion, her energy and determination, her occasional sharp-tongued tartness were dampened whenever she felt she was on show. Even to close friends, the fire of her creative self remained hidden.''
When it came to her late sisters' work, Charlotte employed a similar method of sanitization, idealizing Emily, in Ms. Miller's words, as ''an unthinking sibyl.'' It was a tactic meant to promote an image of her sister's innocence in the face of outraged reaction to ''Wuthering Heights,'' but a tactic that also had the effect of making Emily seem like an empty vessel, ''receiving her vision fully formed from the hand of fate,'' instead of ''a thinking writer capable of weighing individual words with great care.''
Charlotte's portrayals of herself and her sister would mesh with the motives of her first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose book ''Life of Charlotte Brontë'' -- ''arguably the most famous English biography of the nineteenth century'' -- was ''not designed to celebrate the work but to exonerate and iconize'' the Brontë sisters.
As Ms. Miller writes: ''The legend it laid down -- three lonely sisters playing out their tragic destiny on top of a windswept moor with a mad misanthrope father and doomed brother -- was the result of the very particular mind-set Gaskell brought to it.'' It was intended as a kind of apologia for Charlotte's disturbing writings, spinning an image of her as ''an irreproachable martyr-heroine'' while at the same time sanctifying ''the image of the woman writer more generally.''
Although Gaskell's book was riddled with inaccuracies and distortions, it would prove enormously influential, shaping perceptions of the Brontë family for many decades to come. In time the sort of Victorian hagiography that it exemplified would give way to other trends in biography -- shaped by the works of Freud and Lytton Strachey, and later by Marxists, feminists and structuralists -- and eventually the transgressive aspects of the sisters' fiction that had so unsettled their contemporaries would be enshrined.
Yet as Ms. Miller astutely notes, the sisters continued to be treated by many writers as reductive symbols or figureheads. They would be psychoanalyzed, romanticized and radicalized, held up as saints and patronized as victims, and routinely confused with the heroines of their novels. All too often their literary achievement -- including their appropriation of Romantic ideas, their assimilation of other writers' influences, and their own ambition and vision and craft -- would be neglected in favor of voyeuristic excavations of their lives and reductive gender readings of their role as women in a patriarchal world.
That has begun to change in recent years, thanks to Lyndall Gordon's fine biography of Charlotte and now Ms. Miller's own erudite and clear-headed book.