The Victorian preference for sentimental stories and moral high ground can seem turgid and sickly to the modern reader. What is so refreshing about the Brontė women is their relative freedom from such moralizing. They provide an ascerbic, dissenting voice to the remarkably tenacious notion that females are by nature passive and illogical, suitable only for bearing and rearing children. Charlotte in particular protested the persistent belief that physical attractiveness is proportional to moral soundness and refinement. The Brontės actively rejected these attitudes by addressing them explicitly in their novels. This is precisely why they were so controversial in their day. Because the tendency to relegate women to second-class citizenship is still strong I find the novels keenly relevant. They're also very good.

When I first read a Brontė novel, I was struggling with the onset of adolescence. School was a daily irritant and my nerves were strained by everyone around me. Books offered reliable relief. I generally favored history and science fiction, something to take me completely away from my own time. I can't remember why I attempted Jane Eyre, but it wasn't a school assignment. It was, in hindsight, a fateful choice. I rapidly fell in love with Charlotte Brontė's story of a plain, passionate governess despite the difficult and unfamiliar language of 1847.

I was surprised by the immediacy and urgency of the first chapters. I was particularly moved by the scene where Jane was locked in a musty, unused bedroom as punishment for another child's bad behavior and worked herself into a frenzy of fear over half-seen shapes in the dark. I hadn't known writers could tap into the searing memories of being young, powerless, and overimaginative like that. It evoked all the arbitrary unfairness of adult behavior. I cried and cried as I read it.

Gradually I became aware that Charlotte had sisters who also wrote, but it was not until I went to university that I read Emily's Wuthering Heights. The outlandish behavior and violence of feeling in it shocked me. I preferred books that drew me into a fantasy world of glamour or beauty, plots where I heavily identified with the hero or heroine. I had no experience of such passionate, willful people. I didn't believe anyone behaved like Heathcliff and Catherine, and I didn't identify with anyone. It was an uneasy, confusing book but I simply could not stop reading it. It provided me with a new insight: books didn't have to be comfortable to be good.

Then I read a biography of the family. I was thrilled to discover the authors were as odd and unusual as their books. What appealed to me most about them was their insatiable hunger for drama and fantasy. The mental image of queerly dressed, solemn children following world politics and writing florid poetry from the quiet isolation of the Parsonage captivated me. I pictured them filled with exuberance, expectantly waiting for Real Life to begin and carry them away from the limitations of Haworth. My own childhood and adolescence vibrated with the thrilling sense of imminent transformation. I responded wholeheartedly to this shared trait. I felt a kinship with them. I started collecting biographies of the Brontės.

The children throve, at least in the beginning, on a steady diet of exaggerated expectations. The primary effect was their engrossing need to create an alternate universe; being bookish and bright they turned to writing, creating the imaginary countries and elaborate societies of Angria and Gondal in which they were magically powerful beings. Writing eased the wait and satisfied the hunger for a happily ever after.

Of course, their religion reinforced such ideas. Life was supposed to be lived in preparation for the hereafter. Heaven is certainly the ultimate version of delayed gratification. In order to get there all you have to do is wait and be good. This concept has a suffocating effect on anyone with an ounce of pluck since, for a child, being good generally means keeping out of the adults' way and keeping your opinions to yourself. More onerously, it tends to magnify every thought and action to one of tremendous supernatural significance: God is watching. I understood that subtext of life and I knew why it operated so powerfully on them. In their private worlds, they could escape from the burden of passivity and be gods.

Like the Brontės, indulging in complex fantasies was a valuable resource to me for many years; I couldn't imagine it being a liability. It increased my self-esteem, provided delightful visions of grandeur, and shielded me from the frustration of routine and boredom. But gradually a down side emerged, a disabling progression from a natural dislike of being awkward or amateurish to a refusal to try new things. I had been ambitious, dreaming of fame and glamour, not to mention true love in the form of a mate whose interests and qualities perfectly complimented my own. Unfortunately, all those dreams got in the way of reality. As I got older I shrank from possible failure to live up to my own unnaturally high standards. No one came close to fulfilling true love's qualifications. Apathy and guilt became constant companions.

This seems to have been Branwell's chief problem. He was obsessed with glory and longed to be a Great Man of literature. He must have fanned the flames in his sisters over the years as their increasingly sophisticated writing supported their ambition to be published authors. He was considered by his family to be the most talented of them all. Unfortunately, the long years of immersion in a fever-pitched fantasy world metamorphosed into an emotional barrier that blunted his ability to persevere, especially with his art. When his attempts to get his poetry published were met with failure he responded with bitter letters to the publications who had refused him. He mysteriously failed to grasp the opportunity to study at the Royal Academy of Art when sent off to London with money and references. Confronted by setbacks, he ran away and invented reasons for not trying again. He preferred the never-never land of illusion and drugs. When reality broke through he tended to lapse into hysteria. His may have been a fiery, original soul unable to exercise self-restraint. Certainly he knew no middle ground; his adult life was a parody, overacted and ill-considered. I have heartfelt compassion for his inability to accept dreary reality. I recognize some of my own dramatic tendencies and shame at failure taken to terrible lengths. Branwell embodies all the bad decisions, weak resolve, and resentful passivity that plagued me for years.

The clash between internal and external reality can be harsh. The exaggerated expectations were not realized; the need to earn a living imposed itself on the Brontės. For years they had lived in two simultaneous, disparate worlds and those worlds came increasingly into conflict. One division between childhood and adulthood is the recognition that the way you would like things to be may never coincide with the way things are. For most people, the concept is not easily accepted nor easily implemented. Branwell retreated from it. Charlotte and Anne chose the real world. Emily seems to have given imagination and reality equal weight, drifting from one to the other without sensing a conflict at all.

Charlotte is fascinating. I like her best in her twenties when she was taking real and personal risks. She had an enormous amount of resilience and spark, and a decidedly racy taste in heros. It makes her later years deeply poignant, filling me with helpless regret to read of the aching loss from the early deaths of her siblings which left her emotionally isolated, the succumbing to religious morbidity, and her gradual acceptance of the awful knowledge that her ideal lover would never come. She managed to reconcile her needs with the limits of Victorian society and its definition of female roles, though she was never content with the situation. Here was a woman of tremendous talent, quivering with emotional power, possessing a keen, observant mind, who forced herself to submit to stifling convention because she thought that it was her fate to suffer, that God doled out happiness unevenly, a conviction Branwell also held. Unlike Branwell, however, she would not give up entirely, no matter how defeating the circumstances. She was able to bend under adversity where he could not. She did not betray her gift.

Personally, I have never been able to understand the generally dismissive treatment of Anne; she tends to get passed over as a quietly pious, even-tempered lesser talent. This calm little sister, overshadowed in posterity by the rest of her temperamental family, produced two entertaining novels. Both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are rather long on Christian suffering rewarded but contain interesting, believable characters and spare, straightforward prose. Like Charlotte, Anne wrote about ordinary people enduring emotional pain and undeserved censure who win their heart's desire at the end. She, even more than Charlotte, felt compelled to write the truth, no matter how unpalatable. In fact, Charlotte tried to persuade her to write about other subjects (on the theory that Anne was distressing herself by addressing painful autobiographical topics) but she resisted her bossy older sister which must have taken some doing. I think she might have been the strongest of the Brontės in some ways. She held a job the longest, and seemed less buffeted by the winds of the world outside the Parsonage.

Branwell and Emily remind me of the story of Persephone: you must not eat or drink while you visit the enchanted country or you can never return to your old life in the earth above. They ate and drank deeply, careless of their fate. Because of it, those two were the least capable in their family of making their way in the world. Branwell repented at leisure, tormenting his family with his refusal to cope. Emily was made of sterner stuff, focusing her powers and writing an remarkable novel, but she was eccentric even by her family's standards. She became physically ill when separated from her home for more than a few months yet was fiercely independent. Both she and her brother found the gothic, overwrought worlds of Angria and Gondal fulfilling and engrossing long after Charlotte and Anne had turned to their outside experiences for inspiration. There is reason to believe she refined and expanded Wuthering Heights from a story co-written with Branwell. It might be argued that Branwell suffered from Victorian sexism: if he hadn't been coddled and spoiled by virtue of his gender, he may well have developed both his talents and some backbone, perhaps emulating Emily's self-contained, headstrong, uncompromising vision. But he didn't, and we have only Emily's version of their strange, aggressive fantasies to indicate the imaginary worlds that they could not or would not live without.

If at first I felt a bond with the Brontės because of our similarities, twenty-eight years later they represent a cautionary tale. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne are imbedded in my subconscious as icons for the opposing dangers of extreme sensibility and self-abnegation. What happens when the unfulfilled craving for fame or romance causes the spirit to grow morbid and weary? You turn into a Brontė. It is not a pretty fate. There are compensations, of course. The women wrote unusual, original novels that are still in print, being read and appreciated 150 years after their deaths. They have achieved the immortality of authors, one of the fiercely desired goal of their lives. Branwell has his own artwork treasured by posterity, thanks to his painting of his sisters. But the price was high. None of them were ever thoroughly at home in the world: not Branwell who spent long evenings with his mates at the taverns, nor Emily who went to Belgium to train as a teacher with Charlotte, nor Anne who was a governess for four years, nor even Charlotte who ventured out more than the rest and lived to see her literary success. They wanted more than Haworth or London could give them; they wanted their private wishes to come true, and fantasy always outstripped reality in the race for happily ever after.

I do not tire of the Brontės. I think they offer many more years of thoughtful and pleasurable reading. They have meant so much to me in profound and complex ways. I love their emotional intensity and adherence to truth coexisting with the unruly world of fantasy and desire. They are bigger than life and curiously mundane, relevant and revelatory, a fascinating family. They fill me with Brontė dreams.

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