The Story of the Brontës, Penguin, 1986, 409 p including ii p Foreword and ii p Postscript First published 1976.

In her foreword Banks mentioned that when she was approached with the commission to write this book she was daunted – as who would not be given its subject is three of the best-known writers of the nineteenth century, plus their unfortunately less gifted brother? Much of course is known about the Brontë family (and even more written about them) but gaps remain. The fascination they hold for many is such that any exploration of their lives will attract readers eager to glean how such a hotbed of literary invention should arise within one family from a small village in the back of beyond.

So does Dark Quartet illuminate much? A novel is likely to be more accessible than a drier academic piece but has a different purpose and as a novel Dark Quartet suffers from a lack of focus. Here, four main characters are too many, attention to each too diffused.

A lot, especially in the book’s initial stages, is told rather than shown, making any differences between Emily and Charlotte (not so much Anne, as she was younger) haze over. It is only in the latter stages where Emily’s fierce – and thwarted – desire to remain incognito distinguish them. Branwell, praised as he was within the family and over-indulged by his father, did not have the self-possession to rise above that estimation – though surely he secretly must have known, or at least suspected, that his talents were minimal, something which no doubt contributed to his descent into dissolution. It is his learning by accident (for the others had taken pains to keep it from him) that his sisters had attained the validation of publication that precipitates his final crisis. Emily and Anne succumb to consumption, the former by apparently willing it, the latter with forbearance. The unhealthiness at the time of Haworth as a village, the one with the worst death rate in England, the Brontës’ home sited just above the packed cemetery whose decaying contents seeped into its surroundings during any rainfall, running under the church and into the village, goes unremarked here.

Mention is made of the young Brontë siblings’ inventions of imaginary worlds, their notebooks filled with tiny writing, but only on the odd occasion does anyone take to the fabled moors – for inspiration or otherwise. Anne’s (actually not well evidenced) falling in love with her father’s curate Mr Weightman, who was soon to die of cholera, is stated rather than shown but Anne is depicted as being undemonstrative. Similarly Charlotte’s formative sojourn in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger is treated somewhat cursorily.

As an introduction to the family’s history Dark Quartet is an admirable endeavour but perhaps inevitably it fails to conjure up the inner nature of these remarkable people, fails to render them whole. Maybe the novel as a form needs its authors to have free reign, its characters not to be too slaved to historical individuals, to convince completely. Or is it that in this case the task is simply too great?

Pedant’s corner:- Miss Evans’ (Miss Evans’s,) “one of the Miss Woolers” (one of the Misses Wooler,) whiskey (several times; whisky,) Mr Williams’ (Mr Williams’s,) Mr Nicholls’ (Mr Nicholls’s.)

Leather-bound. Collins Clear-Type Press, 1953? (No date was given but the book contains stills from the 1939 film starring Laurence Olivier,) 373 p. Originally published in 1847.

Approaching a classic like this is an odd experience, as it trails a cloud of expectations. I was led to believe it to be a great love story. It isn’t. There is very little evidence in the text of a grand passion between Catherine (Earnshaw as was) and Heathcliff, only a close mutual regard through childhood companionship. She marries someone else, Edgar Linton, apparently quite happily. So does Heathcliff, of course, but that is purely to spite Edgar (who never made any secret of his disregard for Heathcliff) by ensnaring his sister.

The book’s reputation also carries something of the uncanny and indeed it starts with a Gothic touch as Mr Lockwood stops for the night at Wuthering Heights with its strange occupants and we look to be set for a ghost story with Lockwood sleeping in a room where he hears the voice and feels the presence of the long-dead Catherine outside the window. Yet apart from Edgar Linton’s propensity for sitting by Catherine’s grave for hours on end this aspect of the weird is dropped for the entirety of the novel until the last few pages where Heathcliff says he believes spirits live on after death. (And then we have the last line about “unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”)

I was troubled early on by the unexamined – and class-ridden – assumption that because Heathcliff was a foundling and as a child brutish in appearance, he must therefore be brutish in fact. (Another writer once reminded us, “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” after all.) True, Heathcliff’s later behaviour is abhorrent beyond belief but, apart from Edgar Linton’s dislike, Brontë makes little or none of the case that others’ attitudes to him might have conspired to make his character so. After all, Catherine sees something in him. Then again, without his dark character there would have been no story.

In common with many nineteenth century novels the book is to modern eyes wordy and over-written. Also, its structure is overly convoluted. Supposedly narrated by Mr Lockwood, much of the story is relayed to us second-hand through servant Nelly Dean’s recounting (and sometimes even third hand as she tells Lockwood what Catherine Linton has said to her.)

The resolution is rather sudden and, it might be said, convenient. In addition, Catherine Linton’s accommodation with Hareton Earnshaw appears too quick. Even the title is something of a misnomer. Many of the scenes of the story take place in Thrushcross Grange. But that name does not have the Gothic attraction of the gloomy, allusive, adjective “wuthering”.

Pedant’s corner:- “pushed passed” (past,) an occasional missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘if I wished any blessing in the world, is was to find him’” (in the world, it was to find him,) “she learned also than her secret visits were to end” (also that her secret visits,) skurrying (scurrying,) “what inmates their were” (there were.)