The Parson's Daughters

THE BRONTE STORY (368 pp.)--Margaret Lane--Duell-Little ($5).

It is almost 100 years since an English novelist named Elizabeth Gaskell found herself journeying to a sleepy parsonage in Yorkshire, where lived the Rev. Patrick Bronte, an old man, craggy and almost blind. Her mission was to write a biography of Parson Bronte's daughter Charlotte, who had died of consumption only a few months earlier, at 39, in the full flush of her fame and notoriety as the author of Jane Eyre. Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte proved to be one of the great English biographies. Dozens more have since told the Bronte story, but none with greater emotional intensity.

Mrs. Gaskell nonetheless worked under two handicaps: 1) a good many facts were not available to her, and 2) Charlotte's stiff-necked husband regarded her with wary distrust. Now another English novelist, named Margaret Lane, has hit upon the happy idea of interweaving long sections from Mrs. Gaskell's book with a narrative of her own which amplifies the earlier work. The result, says modest Author Lane, is "a sort of footnote to Mrs. Gaskell." It is one of the most readable, least academic footnotes ever dropped.

Imaginary Angria. As Mrs. Gaskell surveyed the ruin of the Brontes--Charlotte, Emily and Anne destroyed by consumption, their brother Branwell wrecked by opium and liquor--she could hardly resist making their father the villain of her story. In her version, Parson Bronte emerged as a man of intellectual vanity and eccentricity, who would fire his pistol in the air when annoyed with his family, who once sawed up all the chairs in his wife's bedroom while the poor woman lay in bed in one of her confinements. But to Biographer Lane, the real villains in the Bronte story are a harsh climate, medical ignorance about tuberculosis, and a repressive moral code which forced the imaginative Bronte girls into erotic fantasies.

Living in isolation on the edge of the moors, never seeing other children, seldom winning a glance of warmth from their father, the little Brontes soon created their own dream world. At 13, Charlotte had written 22 little books of stories about the imaginary land of Angria, where heroes were amoral, sardonic and sadistic; Emily worked at the Gondal chronicles on the wars of Royalists and Republicans in a mysterious kingdom of the North. Later, when Charlotte was a teacher, she found nothing more thrilling than a letter from brother Branwell reporting "news" of one of their old make-believe characters, "the Duke of Zamorna." Jane Eyre was a reworking of the fantasies of Charlotte's childhood, says Author Lane, while sister Emily's Wuthering Heights testified to a stony desire never to abandon the world of imagination for what everyone else called the world of reality.

Tormenting Dreams. Biographer Lane has retold the rest of the Bronte story with tact and drama: how Anne and Charlotte went out to work as governesses, hating every minute of their subjection; how the three girls brought together their secretly composed poems and published them under the pseudonyms of "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell," selling the grand total of two copies; how Branwell, the only son, sank into philandering and alcoholism; how Emily, on her deathbed, refused to see a doctor and remained ruthlessly self-sufficient to the last; how, finally, Charlotte became a literary success, lionized by London yet always conscious that she was an ugly duckling.

Margaret Lane has also summoned facts which Mrs. Gaskell either never knew or could not use. While studying in Brussels, Charlotte became infatuated with one of her teachers, and later wrote him letters full of abject pleas ("If I sleep, I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you, always severe, always grave, always incensed against me . . . To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to answer me, would be to tear from me my only joy on earth . . ."). But these additions merely soften some of Mrs. Gaskell's dramatic outlines without detracting from the dramatic impact of her book. The Bronte girls came into the world like a trio of Fates: Charlotte prim and nearly hysterical, Anne subdued and pathetic, Emily wracked by an iron restraint of her own. Told and retold, their story is unique.

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