What do you think?
Rate this book
The Brontës
Book by Wilks, Brian
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
29 people are currently reading
79 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 23, 2018
This 141 page book includes text depicting the life and times of the famous family and also includes lots of photos, drawing, paintings, etc. (Some are in color, most black and white). Also includes an Index.
Very interesting and informative coffee table style book. Would make a great gift for Bronte fans.
Very interesting and informative coffee table style book. Would make a great gift for Bronte fans.
December 22, 2015
The Brontës: A Biography by Brian Wilks
The Content ReaderHaving just read Brian Wilks book about Jane Austen, it was with great pleasure that I opened his book about the Brontës. Being part of the Brussels Brontë Group and, as such, a fan of the Brontës, I have read quite a few biographies about them. However, as with the Jane Austen biography, I like the way Brian Wilks approach his subjects.
He manages to extract the most important things on the lives he is writing about. It does not mean that you feel that he has left anything out. Not at all. It is all in there, and all verified by his own interpretation of actions and happenings. I actually felt that I have learned more about the Brontës, although I thought I knew it all, by reading Wilks’ biography and his way of making us acquainted with the Brontës. Being such a unique family they have managed to keep us spellbound almost 200 years later.
They were a tightly knit group of people all sharing exceptional gifts, interests and ambitions. As Charlotte tells us:
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters fell for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source - when they have clung to each other from childhood, and when disputes have never sprung up to divide them.
Brian Wilks gives us a thorough knowledge, as far as it is possible of both parents, Maria and Patrick and of their aunt Branwell. He questions some ’acknowledged facts’ and shares with us his ideas, built up with the knowledge there is.
Patrick Brontë’s influence upon his children was profound. Directly and indirectly his style of life and deeply held views were to shape their development as people and as writers. to know them we must first try to know him.
Variously described as selfish, cruel, eccentric; as a recluse and a bigoted tyrant, he has come to represent the popular idea of a typical Victorian father. The shortage of reliable information has allowed too much scope for good stories. The truth is more complicated that the convenient caricature of a bullying, narrow-minded parson. The Rev. Patrick Brontë has been a much misunderstood and maligned man.
About aunt Branwell Brian Wilks has the following to say. I think we can all wonder the same.
On the whole Aunt Branwell remains an enigmatic figure. More than one biographer has wondered why she remained at the Parsonage so long after the children had grown up. If all the accounts of her plainings about her long-lost Cornwall are to be believed, it is a wonder she did not shake the dust of Haworth from off her feet at the earliest opportunity. The truth is that, whatever her memories of Penzance, she remained at Haworth, in her own way devoted to her nephew and nieces, leaving them her possessions and her money, and finally, at her own request, being buried beside her sister under the floor of the church at Haworth.
She really did dedicate her whole life to them and for many years was the pillar of the family.
The introduction to the life of Branwell, the only son, is spot on.
Patrick Branwell Brontë, ’Brany’ as the girls called him, will always remain the enigma of the Brontë family. We just do not know wnough about the ill-fated boy of such remarkable and uneven talents. Almost everything about him lies beneath a question mark. From his earliest days until his death at thirty-one in 1848 the story of his life is one of great promise and yet profound disillusion. He has been seen as excessively melancholic; as a boy and man possessed by a religious mania; as a man haunted by the memory of his dead sister Maria, and as a genius manqué who broke his father’s heart. Whether he was, as some believe, an epileptic (hence his being kept at home rather than sent away to school), or whether he was simply spoiled beyond reason by his doting sisters and indulgent father, the upshot of his education and life was drunkenness, addiction to drugs and a total inability to organise his own affairs.
Branwell does come out as a sad character, and one wonders why he could not do anything of his life. Maybe he was just too spoilt by all the women around him, or he felt the pressure of being the only man, and as such, had to provide support for his sisters. Maybe he just had other problems. We will never really know.
The lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne are told with care and respect. Emily, the recluse, Anne the only one who managed to stay away from Haworth for a longer time and actually supported the family as a governess, and Charlotte who was the entrepreneurial one and saw to it that their novels were published.
We follow their struggles and ambitions and are forever intrigued about the talents that ran in this family. We are still amazed how these three sisters, quite isolated physically, but not mentally, they did read a lot and followed the politics of the time through newspapers, could write such fantastic books. Although I love both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I think that Emily’s Wuthering Heights is the most spectacular one.
Emily’s Wuthering Heights attracted almost as much attention as Jane Eyre, baffling and alarming most of its readers. An unsigned review, one of five found in Emily’s writing desk after her death, is typical of the reasons her powerful imagination evoked;
’In Wuthering Heights, the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and even some passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love - even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising and terrible, and the men are undesirable out of the book itself…
’…We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never read anything like it before. It is very puzzling and very interesting…’
A biography, not very long, but well worth reading about a family out of the extraordinary. Brian Wilks has written more books about the Brontës and Jane Austen which might be interesting to pursue.
Thank you to Endeavour Press for a review copy of a book and writer I might not have discovered otherwise. As usual the views are my personal ones.
Review from my bookblog thecontentreader.blogspot.com
The Content ReaderHaving just read Brian Wilks book about Jane Austen, it was with great pleasure that I opened his book about the Brontës. Being part of the Brussels Brontë Group and, as such, a fan of the Brontës, I have read quite a few biographies about them. However, as with the Jane Austen biography, I like the way Brian Wilks approach his subjects.
He manages to extract the most important things on the lives he is writing about. It does not mean that you feel that he has left anything out. Not at all. It is all in there, and all verified by his own interpretation of actions and happenings. I actually felt that I have learned more about the Brontës, although I thought I knew it all, by reading Wilks’ biography and his way of making us acquainted with the Brontës. Being such a unique family they have managed to keep us spellbound almost 200 years later.
They were a tightly knit group of people all sharing exceptional gifts, interests and ambitions. As Charlotte tells us:
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters fell for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source - when they have clung to each other from childhood, and when disputes have never sprung up to divide them.
Brian Wilks gives us a thorough knowledge, as far as it is possible of both parents, Maria and Patrick and of their aunt Branwell. He questions some ’acknowledged facts’ and shares with us his ideas, built up with the knowledge there is.
Patrick Brontë’s influence upon his children was profound. Directly and indirectly his style of life and deeply held views were to shape their development as people and as writers. to know them we must first try to know him.
Variously described as selfish, cruel, eccentric; as a recluse and a bigoted tyrant, he has come to represent the popular idea of a typical Victorian father. The shortage of reliable information has allowed too much scope for good stories. The truth is more complicated that the convenient caricature of a bullying, narrow-minded parson. The Rev. Patrick Brontë has been a much misunderstood and maligned man.
About aunt Branwell Brian Wilks has the following to say. I think we can all wonder the same.
On the whole Aunt Branwell remains an enigmatic figure. More than one biographer has wondered why she remained at the Parsonage so long after the children had grown up. If all the accounts of her plainings about her long-lost Cornwall are to be believed, it is a wonder she did not shake the dust of Haworth from off her feet at the earliest opportunity. The truth is that, whatever her memories of Penzance, she remained at Haworth, in her own way devoted to her nephew and nieces, leaving them her possessions and her money, and finally, at her own request, being buried beside her sister under the floor of the church at Haworth.
She really did dedicate her whole life to them and for many years was the pillar of the family.
The introduction to the life of Branwell, the only son, is spot on.
Patrick Branwell Brontë, ’Brany’ as the girls called him, will always remain the enigma of the Brontë family. We just do not know wnough about the ill-fated boy of such remarkable and uneven talents. Almost everything about him lies beneath a question mark. From his earliest days until his death at thirty-one in 1848 the story of his life is one of great promise and yet profound disillusion. He has been seen as excessively melancholic; as a boy and man possessed by a religious mania; as a man haunted by the memory of his dead sister Maria, and as a genius manqué who broke his father’s heart. Whether he was, as some believe, an epileptic (hence his being kept at home rather than sent away to school), or whether he was simply spoiled beyond reason by his doting sisters and indulgent father, the upshot of his education and life was drunkenness, addiction to drugs and a total inability to organise his own affairs.
Branwell does come out as a sad character, and one wonders why he could not do anything of his life. Maybe he was just too spoilt by all the women around him, or he felt the pressure of being the only man, and as such, had to provide support for his sisters. Maybe he just had other problems. We will never really know.
The lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne are told with care and respect. Emily, the recluse, Anne the only one who managed to stay away from Haworth for a longer time and actually supported the family as a governess, and Charlotte who was the entrepreneurial one and saw to it that their novels were published.
We follow their struggles and ambitions and are forever intrigued about the talents that ran in this family. We are still amazed how these three sisters, quite isolated physically, but not mentally, they did read a lot and followed the politics of the time through newspapers, could write such fantastic books. Although I love both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I think that Emily’s Wuthering Heights is the most spectacular one.
Emily’s Wuthering Heights attracted almost as much attention as Jane Eyre, baffling and alarming most of its readers. An unsigned review, one of five found in Emily’s writing desk after her death, is typical of the reasons her powerful imagination evoked;
’In Wuthering Heights, the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and even some passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love - even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising and terrible, and the men are undesirable out of the book itself…
’…We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never read anything like it before. It is very puzzling and very interesting…’
A biography, not very long, but well worth reading about a family out of the extraordinary. Brian Wilks has written more books about the Brontës and Jane Austen which might be interesting to pursue.
Thank you to Endeavour Press for a review copy of a book and writer I might not have discovered otherwise. As usual the views are my personal ones.
Review from my bookblog thecontentreader.blogspot.com
February 10, 2013
This was a charity shop find, and a really interesting one. It begins with the career of Patrick Bronte, from an Irish cottage to an Oxford college, and quotes examples of his letters, pamphlets and poems - a much more rounded picture than Mrs Gaskell's 'old tyrant!' It also explains his part in the mill riots that Charlotte B used in Shirley. The other big boon of this book is the good-quality, good size illustrations - the classic portrait almost full-size, but also several of Charlotte's careful copyings of engravings (no wonder she had poor sight) and Bewick and Martin pictures she took them from - Emily's portrait of her beloved dog, Keeper - Charlotte's painting of Anne which makes Branwell's goggle-eyed version make sense. There are a number of photographs of the parsonage and church, not long after the Bronte's tenure, with the graves making almost a paving, and of the other houses linked with the family. There are also photographs of the people in their story - Ellen Nussey, as a pert, bright-eyed girl in Charlotte's drawing, and as an older lady - Constantin Heger and his wife - Miss Wooler.
A very readable introduction to the Bronte family, and worth getting just for the quality of the illustrations.
A very readable introduction to the Bronte family, and worth getting just for the quality of the illustrations.
August 29, 2017
This is a superb, scholarly biography written in 1974 so some of it reads slightly outdated. Nevertheless it is a wonderful read giving a complete overview of the Brontes, both individually and collectively and their sadly short lives. We would now know that Charlotte suffered from hyperemesis, extreme vomiting in pregnancy, and doubtless the treatment of the time hastened her end.
September 21, 2017
I enjoy any biography of the Bronte family, and this one was no exception. A tragic tale, in an astounding setting. This version is split into sections, which makes the reading very easy. It also gives us more information about the father, Patrick Bronte, which added to my knowledge of the family. Such a tragedy; always a fascinating read. This one is well written in an interesting manner.
May 30, 2017
Not brilliantly written but a thoroughly enjoyable read and I now have a far better understanding of the Brontes and the desire to read more of them - can't ask for more than that!
March 14, 2017
I'm glad I read this book as it gave an interesting insight into the lives of the Bronte sisters and the influences on their writing. I'm feeling inspired to read some of their works I haven't yet read. Quite readable and neatly organised it's worth a read.
December 29, 2015
Brian Wilks usefully sets the Bronte story into context. It is easy to forget Patrick was born before the French Revolution and died after the Crimean war and must have witnessed huge industrialisation and rapid changes. It is salutary to also be reminded that despite the tragedies experienced in Haworth parsonage it was a house full of children and must have enjoyed times of laughter, particularly in the creation of the miniature books full of numerous parodies.
Patrick's ambitious, courageous and determined rise from the eldest of ten children born to a peasant farmer in Ireland to a teacher and Cambridge graduate helps to explain some of the traits echoed in his own remarkable children. Maria Bronte's courtship letters are deservedly quoted in some detail as so little else remains to illustrate her character and the affectionate teasing tone of her courtship.
Haworth itself so vital a part of the Brontes' developing characters is vividly described and demonstrated as far from the isolated tiny village of popular myth. Even Aunt Branwell receives sympathetic credit for her example of living by doing her duty and consideration is given to the way she educated her nieces. Sound evidence is used as a basis for theories such as the closeness of the children after their mother and eldest sisters deaths and how disastrous the shock of the contrast between the liberality of Patrick's ideas on education and the neglect and ill treatment at Cowan Bridge were. In contrast Roe Head was vital to Charlotte's development, particularly her friendships.
Each member of the family is distinctly portrayed as an individual but the individual strands of their lives woven skilfully together. The whole book is clearly written, well researched and an engrossing well told story of a fascinating family the author obviously admires with affection: it is an excellent read for all Bronte fans.
Patrick's ambitious, courageous and determined rise from the eldest of ten children born to a peasant farmer in Ireland to a teacher and Cambridge graduate helps to explain some of the traits echoed in his own remarkable children. Maria Bronte's courtship letters are deservedly quoted in some detail as so little else remains to illustrate her character and the affectionate teasing tone of her courtship.
Haworth itself so vital a part of the Brontes' developing characters is vividly described and demonstrated as far from the isolated tiny village of popular myth. Even Aunt Branwell receives sympathetic credit for her example of living by doing her duty and consideration is given to the way she educated her nieces. Sound evidence is used as a basis for theories such as the closeness of the children after their mother and eldest sisters deaths and how disastrous the shock of the contrast between the liberality of Patrick's ideas on education and the neglect and ill treatment at Cowan Bridge were. In contrast Roe Head was vital to Charlotte's development, particularly her friendships.
Each member of the family is distinctly portrayed as an individual but the individual strands of their lives woven skilfully together. The whole book is clearly written, well researched and an engrossing well told story of a fascinating family the author obviously admires with affection: it is an excellent read for all Bronte fans.
January 30, 2016
The Bröntes by Brian Wilks is informational and historical. The reader will learn interesting facts such as:
*The last name was originally Prunty and later change to Brönte.
*Patrick, the father, was an assistant schoolteacher and poet.
*Maria, the mother, died of cancer after nine years' of marriage.
*Their children, Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre), Branwill, Emily, and Anne ALL had a talent for writing.
The text, though, needs to be updated as old terms such as parsonage, offal, effluvium, and squalor are used.
The Bröntes by Brian Wilks would be perfect for historians, Brönte admirers, or as a resource to write a modern-style story on the Brönte family.
To read more reviews, visit http://www.McNeilsReviews.com
*The last name was originally Prunty and later change to Brönte.
*Patrick, the father, was an assistant schoolteacher and poet.
*Maria, the mother, died of cancer after nine years' of marriage.
*Their children, Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre), Branwill, Emily, and Anne ALL had a talent for writing.
The text, though, needs to be updated as old terms such as parsonage, offal, effluvium, and squalor are used.
The Bröntes by Brian Wilks would be perfect for historians, Brönte admirers, or as a resource to write a modern-style story on the Brönte family.
To read more reviews, visit http://www.McNeilsReviews.com
November 1, 2016
Readable and an interesting take on the authors and the times they lived in. I'm a real Bronte fan, having read most of the sister's books. I'll go back an re-read some of them now. This book is well researched and yet easy to read. Illuminating and enjoyable.
March 18, 2012
4.5 Stars
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews