Volume 42, Number 17 · November 2, 1995
Dangerous Women
By Millicent Bell
The Brontës
by Juliet Barker
St. Martin's Press / A Thomas Dunne Book, 1,004 pp., $35.00
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
by Lyndall Gordon
Norton, 418 pp., $27.50
The Letters of Charlotte Brontë
edited by Margaret Smith
Volume 1: 1829–1847 Oxford University Press, 588 pp., $90.00
On Sundays and holidays buses and cars back up along the steeply inclined main street with its cobbles set long ago to catch the slipping hooves of horses, for Haworth is England's most visited tourist shrine after Stratford. The Black Bull, where Branwell drank himself sodden, now has a Brontë Room, and nearby shops sell Brontë T-shirts. In the church where they are all—except Anne—buried in the family vault, there is a Brontë chapel and an American window donated by American Brontë worshipers. In the parsonage museum are Charlotte's tiny shoes, the brass collar of Emily's dog, Keeper. But the pilgrim who wanders off to locate the waterfall to which Charlotte went for her last rustic walk arrives too quickly by a paved road. The moors are hardly so grandly empty, so given over to sky and heath, as one expects from Wuthering Heights.
Review, 5881 words
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