Treat this book as an exceptionally well informed -- indeed, encyclopedic -- authority. But do not for a moment think that this is the Brontë Bible, or the last word on the subject.

 For my birthday in august

I received these wonderful books

 from college's and friends

I love to read  it, it is so interesting

On internet I was reading part of it

But now I own it myself

i really am happy because of this

On the internet I also read about Juliet Barkers biography of the Brontes

I own this book already

I received it from the Bronte Blog

when in december 2011 I was winning

their contest.

 

'Yet another biography of the Brontës requires an apology, or at least an explanation," Juliet Barker writes in her introduction. Actually, the explanation is quite simple: The previous biographers were wrong, and Barker is right.
 

Brontë biography, in Barker's view, is a perpetuation of error. Read her 150 or so pages of notes, and you will see that she lines up her predecessors only to mow them down. They simply haven't done their homework -- such as reading the local papers and using the most authoritative texts of the novels. Instead, they repeat one another's errors. And they accept too much of the story as Elizabeth Gaskell, the first Brontë biographer, invented it: a grim parsonage presided over by a dour father, a wastrel son, and long-suffering daughters isolated from civilization, but somehow able to tap into their own creative reserves and produce world-famous novels.
 

But wait! Haven't I heard this before? Ah, yes, in Lucasta Miller's recent "The Brontë Myth." But wait! There's also Angus Mason Mackay's "The Brontës: Fact and Fiction," first published in 1897. Even Gaskell revised and corrected many of her initial impressions. For that is what biography is: gradual correction of error and accumulation of insight built on the work of others. Even Barker relies on Gaskell's narrative in some instances. Yet in Barker's view, biographers are like Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights -- thrown into a situation that quite overmasters them.

Of course, Juliet Barker is one of the supreme authorities on the Brontës. And it is fascinating to watch her correct and add to the record. But too often she is an absolutist. Thus she doubts that Anne's poetry is autobiographical because Emily was writing similar lines at the same time. Why does it have to be either/or? Why does Barker continually ask questions that are really putdowns of previous biographers? No doubt, there has been bad work done on the Brontës, and that needs to be shown up. But the result is that Barker herself sometimes narrows rather than expands our sense of who these complex figures were.

Treat this book as an exceptionally well informed -- indeed, encyclopedic -- authority. But do not for a moment think that this is the Brontë Bible, or the last word on the subject.

Carl Rollyson is co-author, with Lisa Paddock, of "The Brontës: A to Z." Startribune

A door in Cornhill

An ancient thoroughfare with a mythic past, Cornhill takes its name from one of the three former hills of the City of London – an incline barely perceptible today after centuries of human activity upon this site, building and razing, rearranging the land. This is a place does not declare its multilayered history. Yet a pair of carved mahogany doors, designed by the sculptor Walter Gilbert in 1939 at 32 Cornhill – opposite the old pump – bring episodes from this rich past alive in eight graceful tableaux.
Walter Gilbert (1871-1946) was a designer and craftsman who developed his visual style in the Arts & Crafts movement at the end of the nineteenth century and then applied it to a wide range of architectural commissions in the twentieth century, including the gates of Buckingham Palace, sculpture for the facade of Selfridges and some distinctive war memorials. 

Gilbert’s elegant reliefs appeal to me for the laconic humour that observes the cool autocracy of King Lucius and the sullen obedience of his architects, and for the sense of human detail that emphasises W. M. Thackeray’s curls at his collar in the meeting with Anne and Charlotte Bronte at the offices of their publisher Smith, Elder & Co.

Look for more beautiful photographs on spitalfieldslife/a-door-in-cornhill/