![]() ![]() As for the four siblings, Barker takes care not to presume or sentimentalize. (Her accounts of bad sanitary conditions and rife disease are especially compelling.) Patrick Bronte, in her perspective, emerges as an impressively rational and steadfastly affectionate father, not the egregiously high-minded belligerent of lore. ![]() Convincingly, she portrays Haworth, the town where the Brontes passed their lives, not as the traditional barrens, but as a fairly active agricultural and mercantile locale, subject to clerical, political, and economic struggles. But Barker, a past curator of the BronteParsonage Museum, tells a different tale with admirable objectivity her extensively documented alternative view is based on new material, including family letters. ![]() ![]() Neither Charlotte, Emily, Anne, nor Branwell Brontelived past the age of 38, yet they left an impression on English literature that has fully occupied biographers, many of whom have portrayed the Brontes as doomed romantics, held captive for all of their adult years by a cruel, widowed curate father in the wasteland of the Yorkshire moors. ![]()
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