The Brontes: A Life in Letters

Upon its publication in 1995, Juliet Barker's The Brontës was deemed a monumental achievement that set a new standard in literary biography; it garnered rave reviews and was cited as a New York Times Notable Book of 1995 and a Publisher's Weekly Best Book of 1995. In The Brontës: A Life in Letters, the much anticipated follow-up to that landmark biography, Barker uses newly discovered letters and manuscripts, some appearing in print for the first time, to reveal the authentic voices of the three novelist sisters. The letters detail the siblings' self-absorbed childhood, highlighted by wild, imaginative games; the years of struggling to earn a living in uncongenial occupations before they took the literary world by storm; the terrible marring of that success as Branwell, Emily, and Anne died tragically young; the final years as Charlotte, battling against grief, loneliness, and ill health, emerged from anonymity to take her place in literary society.

In The Brontës: A Life in Letters, Juliet Barker has produced a work of impeccable scholarship but also a story as dramatic, and undeniably readable as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

"Barker proves herself an impeccable editor of family papers we are all the richer for possessing." (New York Times Book Review)

"Provides a real sense of what those strange, brilliant people were like." (The Atlantic Monthly)