The Poems of Anne Brontë

Abstract

This should come as a relief to anyone perturbed by the seemingly widening divergence of mythologised representations of the Bront€es from their historical originals multiplying online and in print. And yet in the first two wonderful Bront€e Mysteries novels—the third will be published in November 2021—we find the boldest divergence yet. Starting in the summer of 1845, when in reality the four siblings found themselves back together at the parsonage, the novels imagine Charlotte, Emily and Anne secretly becoming amateur detectives, a wry anticipation of their covert literary careers gestating during the first two adventures. Investigating the unexplained disappearance of a young woman from a nearby country estate and, in The Diabolical Bones, the discovery of human remains bricked up in the walls of a remote moorland manor, the sisters interrogate, deduce, and collate their material through wonderfully satisfying plot twists. Where she could have written a pastiche of 19th-century literary style, Coleman narrates the action in elegant contemporary prose, rich in gothic detail and lively characterisation. Her extensive knowledge of the minutiae of the Bront€es’ lives and the wellsprings of their inspirations is enlivened by an almost clairvoyant intuition that allows her to fill the gaps in the historical record so convincingly. Her portraits of the Bront€e household, and particularly the three sisters, are mesmerising. Their dialogue is particularly persuasive, as each of the sisters’ voices rings with characteristic inflections, sparking when tensions between the canny and resolute Charlotte and the intuitive, unsociable Emily are moderated by the voice of judicious Anne. It is in some ways moving to have them reconstructed so carefully and so authentically: here are the Bront€es alive and vital, burning with exuberant ingenuity and curiosity. Yet Coleman is too witty and astute to be sentimental about the family and too appreciative of those aspects of their characters that contemporaries found unnerving or difficult to see them as anything but. Bold, inventive and breathlessly plotted, The Vanished Bride and The Diabolical Bones will captivate all those who already love the Bront€es, those who are coming to them for the first time, and those who are yet to encounter them.