Book 634: The Mother of the Brontës – Sharon Wright

I somehow managed to read a biography of Maria Branwell Brontë prior to reading a biography of any of her offspring. I’m not sure why, but when I saw this one on NetGalley it just spoke to me.*

Maybe it’s because I finally got to visit The Brontë Parsonage last year, or maybe I some how knew that Kirkstall Abbey (which I visited over a decade ago while living in Leeds) was connected to the Brontës without really knowing it. Or maybe, like Wright, I was appalled that I spent a considerable amount of time less than 60 miles from their home. Or maybe it was just another opportunity to revisit God’s Own Country via this book which Wright references. Who knows?

All I know is that Wright was able to write a pretty thorough biography of Maria Branwell Brontë when she went in saying there’s not a lot of information about her. Sure the minutiae, like which route she took going north from Cornwall may not be known, but there seems to be quite a bit known in this book.

I think the thing I found most interesting was that Jane Austen and Maria Branwell Brontë were contemporaries and Wright mentions this on multiple occasions. Sure this is because I’m one of the rare people that appreciates the Brontës and Austen, but I found it fascinating that there is pretty much irrefutable proof that Maria read Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Maybe Charlotte’s visceral dislike of Austen stems less from actual dislike and more from feeling disgruntled because of her mother’s early death? [I’m absolutely projecting here, but it made me think twice about it as I read more and more of how Maria and Austen were of similar social status and life styles.] Another contemporary mentioned is Anne Lister,

“Just seven miles away in Shibden Hall near Halifax lived Maria and Elizabeth’s West Yorkshire contemporary, Anne Lister. Dubbed ‘Gentleman Jack’ she was among the first British women to live an openly gay life. Her detailed diaries were so explicit she wrote parts of them in code.” (108)

We watched Gentleman Jack on HBO and I have every intention of reading a biography of Anne Lister at some point in the future.

I found Wright’s writing style to be easy to read and even though I set aside a couple of weeks to read this, it only took a couple of days. She wove the story together seamlessly and provided just enough detail and embellishment that it never broached on creative nonfiction like many other biographies I’ve read.

The one thing that drove me absolutely wild was the formatting of this galley. It was so early it wasn’t in a MOBI or any other valid e-reader format, it was legitimately a PDF export of the design files with the design name and time and cut/bleed marks on them. It made it a very difficult reading experience in that I had to zoom in on each page to read it because the spacing was so weird and it wasn’t responsive to the device I was on. Books like this are one of the biggest reasons my NetGalley usage has drastically decreased. The other reason you’ll hear about when I talk about the other Brontë book, The Vanished Bride (A Brontë Sisters Mystery #1), I got from there recently.

Recommendation: I found this gave me a better understanding of the Brontës in that I know more about where they came from. Wright did a great job of balancing what is known (and written) and what is unknown about Maria Branwell Brontë’s life. I’m not sure if I’d read other biographies of the Brontë’s if this would’ve been as good, but for me it fit the timing and provided extra details that I didn’t know.

*I received a digital copy of The Mother of the Brontës from the publisher via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No money or goods were exchanged.

Opening Line: “To the little girl gazing from the windows of her cosy attic nursery, the whole world seemed arranged for her entertainment.”

Closing Line: “Most of their mother’s words are scattered to the four winds but one letter in her own hand survives the centuries. The letter that speaks of it all. Not of sorrow, but of love. Not of death, but of a passionate life. Of shipwrecks real and imagined. The one that begins, My dear saucy Pat…” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction).

Additional Quotes from The Mother of the Brontës
“Wesley encouraged social action, such as prison reform and education for the poor. He also advocated a simple and orderly routine of study and devotion, earning his followers the epithet Methodists.” (8)