Brontë family dynamics

FICTION: The Taste of SorrowBy Jude Morgan Headline, 373pp. £12.99

THE EXAMINATION of the Brontë phenomenon began early. In 1857, popular novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, who had died only two years previously, and, perhaps influenced by her own grief, Gaskell created a romantic myth that has remained the cornerstone of the Brontë story: that of a tragic family living in social isolation in a chilly parsonage at the edge of a moor.

There were some clues in Gaskell's account as to how Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne were able to create such emotionally powerful novels as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heightsand Agnes Grey,but Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrowgoes deeper into the women's psyches while at the same time presenting us with the ordinary, everyday lives of real, three-dimensional women living at a particular time, with all the social constraints that brought.

His book is a fascinating and lively read that doesn’t rely on the reader being a Brontë fan – although their fiction is so well known that most readers will have at least some knowledge of it, even if it’s only through Kate Bush’s overblown pop song about Heathcliff.

In terms of genre, Morgan’s book is difficult to pin down. It’s not pure biography in that he doesn’t bother with detailed dates, instead he gives a lively linear narrative of the Brontës’ family history, beginning with sketchy details of Patrick Brunty’s (or Prunty’s) escape from his mud-cottage upbringing in Co Down to study at Oxford, where he sloughed off his past, dropping the y in his name for a more upmarket and mysterious ë.

Nor is it pure fiction, because the historical detail that is the basis of the book is true and well documented, from their brother Branwell’s toy soldiers that were used to re-enact the siblings’ made-up stories, to the deaths of the two eldest girls after their enrolment in a brutal boarding school, to the story of how Charlotte, Emily and Anne first self-published their poems under male pseudonyms before going on to write their commercial blockbusters. The fact that their poetry collection only sold two copies is also true and should inspire writers everywhere.

Morgan’s lively imagination is what makes this book such an enjoyable read, particularly his imagining of the Brontë conversations, because it is the dialogue that lets the very different characters of the three women emerge and permits the family dynamic to be explored. It’s also through dialogue that he fleshes out and brings to life the other important characters in the Brontë story: distant father Patrick, waster and indulged brother Branwell, pious Aunt Branwell and even their superstition-ridden housemaid, Tabby.

The three writers emerge not as wan, doomed creatures on the edge of a windswept moor but as self-aware, determined women who took the opportunities that came their way, whether it was teaching in a school in Belgium or travelling to London, and who made choices, albeit within limited financial and social parameters, about how they wished to live.

While Patrick Brontë was quick to leave Co Down behind, Morgan explores how the family’s Irishness may have affected the women.

While on a visit to the home of an upper-class acquaintance where Branwell was as voluble as usual, “a lady stiff with silk and gauze remarked in Charlotte’s hearing to her husband, ‘Yes Irish I think, there is always something a little vulgar in their vitality’.” In response, a mortified Charlotte gave silent thanks for her education, during which, at school, she won a prize for “the purity of her English”.

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Timesjournalist