In Search of Anne Brontë

by Nick Holland

Anne Brontë, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Brontë sisters, remains a bestselling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels – Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – and her poetry belies the quiet, yet courageous girl who often lived in the shadows of her more celebrated sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontës, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. This revealing new biography opens Anne’s most private life to a new audience and shows the true nature of her relationship with her sister Charlotte.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, 21st Century, 19th Century, British Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

Published March 3, 2016

About the author

Nick Holland was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire and went to University in Huddersfield and, later, San Diego.
Whilst living in the USA he developed a love of the books of Raymond Chandler and after returning to England decided to write a hard boiled thriller of his own, but set in Yorkshire. Thus 'The Girl On The Bus' was born. The Girl On The Bus has become a Kindle sensation, at point being the 5th most downloaded book in the United Kingdom and regularly featuring in the Amazon top 100 paid bestsellers!
A follow up to The Girl On The Bus will be released in Summer 2013.
Nick loves tortoises and was shocked to find only one children's novel about them: 'Esio Trot' by Roald Dahl. Taking matters into his own hands he wrote 'Tortoise Soup', a delightful story of friendship and bravery aimed at children aged 8-108. So now there are two quality children's books about tortoises.
Nick Holland has also written award winning poetry and his play 'Rudisha' was performed in London in 2012 to coincide with the Olympic games.
He is a also a ventriloquist, can you guess what his puppet is? That's right - it's a tortoise!

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

An overly melodramatic blend of often glaringly incorrect facts and cloying scenes depicting how Nick Holland presumes Anne Brontë was feeling at various points in her life - this reads like fanfic. Ultimately, this biography doesn't really offer any new or unique perspective and certainly does nothing to challenge the static image of Gaskell's 'docile, pensive Anne'.

Even on surface level, it's riddled with mistakes. Gilbert Markham from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is referred to as 'Gabriel' on at least two occasions and Edward Weston from Agnes Grey is mistaken for 'Edmund'. When discussing the contextual influences for Wuthering Heights, there are two mistakes in one sentence:

'Branwell's excesses are reflected in both Heathcliffe and Linton.'

Firstly, that's not how you spell Heathcliff - and I'm pretty sure Branwell gave Emily Brontë the character of Hindley (the evil brother), not the tediously demure Linton.

This is written like a bad tragedy. Holland's version of Anne is always crying or at best has 'tears in her eyes'. Other syrupy lines include 'the glow of filial love' and 'fingers touching as she passed him a book'. This is an unneeded tangent from the facts and is distracting in itself. I had to smother giggles - and not good giggles, either.

However, I thought this was insightful and enlightening in terms of Anne's religious doubt, which served to clarify her ambivalent relationship with Charlotte Brontë stemming from the Roe Head estrangement. There's also an appendix of Anne's drawings and through this biography I discovered the photograph labelled 'Les Soeurs Brontë' - maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but the resemblance to 'The Pillar Portrait' are uncanny:



Spooky, huh?

Poorly executed and a bit of a disappointment. If you're looking for a decent and heartfelt biography, I highly recommend Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life.

[Girl with her Head in a Book · Rating 1 out of 5]

For my full review: https://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/...

With Anne Brontë approaching her bicentenary, it does seem a shame that the main thing people have to say about her is that she is forgotten.  Underappreciated.  The third Beatle.  The very title of this biography underlines its defensive stance - despite her literary celebrity, it has still been necessary to go 'in search' of her.  Nick Holland runs an Anne Brontë blog and this book is clearly a real passion project.  Indeed, it is highly unusual to read a biography with such an openly partisan attitude towards its subject.  Between this and his early admission that he had taken the lack of solid evidence around Anne's life as a licence to speculate, the reader realises rapidly that Holland is doing for Anne Brontë what Mrs Gaskell did over a hundred fifty years ago for Anne's sister Charlotte.

Beginning in 1820 with Anne's birth, Holland tells his story with full imaginative verve and detail.  It was a cold winter, the previous year's harvest had failed, it was the best of times and the worst of times.  When the family moved to Haworth, Holland imagines the baby Anne being passed back and forth between her mother and father's arms and describes it confidently as fact.  Early on, he also refers to Agnes Grey's potted history of her family as a reference point for Anne's own relations.

At university, I studied Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, or The History of the Kings of Britain.  I fell in love with it.  It was bonkers.  There were names of people who had never existed and deeds which had never taken place and it was all down as fact.  However, I learnt an important lesson about early historical scholarship.  Where there was no evidence, writers such as Geoff would pray to God and then keep on writing, believing God to be guiding their pen, no matter what it was that came out.  Since then, whenever I read a biography and it stumbles into speculation, I try to ask myself whether the writer is doing their best with limited material or if they are going full-on Geoffrey.  Unfortunately, there were quite a few moments where Holland's undoubted enthusiasm causes him to stumble into Geoffrey territory.

As a personal pet Brontë fan peeve, I found it odd that Holland had made so little effort to interrogate the reliability of his source material.  He cites John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer, as a reliable primary source while making no reference to how Greenwood was someone who tried to make money out of over-stating his relationship with the family.  In actual fact, he sold the sisters paper and not a great deal else, but after their deaths, Greenwood sought to ingratiate himself with Mrs Gaskell by posing as a close family friend.  Charlotte's widower found him infuriating.  Similarly, Holland goes to great pains to point out instances where Charlotte was unfair to Anne but then writes flatteringly of Ellen Nussey who was after all Charlotte's sycophant.

Having read quite a few Brontë biographies, there does come a point where no matter the passion behind them, they do run the risk of appearing repetitive.  Holland ticks through all the well-known Brontë myths but in contrast to Samantha Ellis' recent Anne Brontë memoir Take Courage, he does not try to engage with them any further.  For instance, he mentions Lady Amberley's famous quote approving of Agnes Grey as something that should be given to all families with governesses as a 'reminder to be human' but, unlike Ellis, Holland does not dig down deeper to said Lady's incredulity that well-bred people would actually behave like the Bloomfields or the Murrays.  Unfortunately, this does mean In Search Of lacks much in the way of original interpretation.

Most troubling of all is Holland's insistence that Anne Brontë's love for William Weightman was an 'all-consuming conflagration' which dominated her entire life.  At this point, Holland's speculation reaches a fever pitch of its own, imagining clandestine meetings and declarations and planned futures together.  There is no evidence.  Charlotte made some catty remarks in a letter and Anne once wrote a poem with a message that it was sad he had died so young.  Juliet Barker's The Brontës establishes fairly firmly that Anne passed up various opportunities to visit Haworth when Weightman was there, indicating that she probably had no strong feelings about him.  Even if she did find him attractive, it is disrespectful to imply that he must have become her reason for being.  Not only is this a big Geoffrey-of-Monmouth moment, but it is also very reminiscent of when scholar Virginia Moore couldn't read Emily Brontë's handwriting and mistook the poem title 'Love's Friendship' for 'Louis Parensall' and decided Emily must have had a French lover.  Charlotte Brontë was the one who had the all-consuming conflagrations for men, her sisters were too busy writing.

As an ardent fan of Anne Brontë, it was strange for me to be raising my eyebrows at the lengths to which Holland goes to paint her in a positive light.  He claims one of the Robinson girls who was known for charitable giving in adulthood as a sign that Anne's teaching took root, not really acknowledging that charity was rather the province of the upper-class married woman.  Weirdly though, Holland also cites the episode of Anne supposedly tying the Ingham children to her desk as fact, even though many scholars have speculated that Mrs Ingham made this up out of embarrassment when her family became linked with the ghastly Bloomfields in Agnes Grey.

I also wondered slightly at Holland's peculiar retelling of the Mrs Collins episode.  That lady was the wife of John Collins, one of the Keighley curates, a man with violent and alcoholic tendencies.  Patrick Brontë had advised Mrs Collins to take her child and leave her husband.  Holland would have it that she followed this advice immediately.  She did not.  Mrs Collins stayed with her husband, had another child, was beaten more and caught a sexually transmitted disease from him and was finally abandoned.  The positive outcome is that she got back on her feet and opened a boarding house, visiting the Haworth Brontës to show that things had come good again.  Her story is frequently cited by Brontë scholars as a possible inspiration for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.  While Holland may be simplifying the story for his readers, it was odd that he quoted Charlotte's letter saying 'In Charlotte's words, [Mrs Collins] had 'triumphed over the hideous disease of staying with a man who did not love her and who had mistreated her'.  Charlotte was not talking about the metaphorical disease of an abusive marriage.  Charlotte was talking about actual venereal disease, which Mrs Collins had recovered from medically.  Did Holland not understand that or was he trying to sanitise that fact?  If so, why?

The florid style of Holland's narration gives the book an easy flow and I did wonder whether he might have been better suited to writing a piece of biographical fiction instead.  When he describes certain moments such as Branwell's dismissal from Thorp Green and imagines Emily and Charlotte asking questions while Anne 'stared fixedly at the floor', a distinct departure has been made from the realms of biography.  Holland's telling of how Charlotte 'coldly' refused to speak to her sister when she arrived at Roe Head is not something I have read in any other biographies and he cites no sources.  It then becomes difficult to know how far Holland is to be trusted as a historian.

In Search Of Anne Brontë is both pacey and full of passionate feeling for the woman at its heart.  It is possible that it would have been a more enjoyable read for a newcomer to the Brontë story, although Holland's use of sources does cause concern.  I cannot fault his championing of Anne Brontë as a writer - I bought this book with some of my Christmas vouchers, highly excited to discover another biography of Anne so it is with great regret that my review has had to be so critical.  I agree with the substances of many of his major points; Anne Brontë has been ridiculously neglected as a writer, her sister Charlotte absolutely did do her no favours at all in how she treated Anne after her death and she does deserve wider attention.  It's just that in searching for Anne Brontë, Nick Holland appears to have looked first and foremost within his own imagination and that has led to a a biography ultimately lacking in substance.

[Sean Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anne Brontë, the most underrated and unappreciated of the Brontës, wrote the greatest book between them: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet thanks to her sister Charlotte's outliving her, and Charlotte's own personal dislike of the novel, the mastery of Anne went unnoticed for almost a century after her death. It is also unfortunate that most of what we know about the Brontës comes from Charlotte's own correspondence, which was saved by the friends she had written to. Charlotte destroyed many of Emily and Anne's own papers, which means most of the Brontë history comes from a biased perspective.

Anne and Charlotte's relationship was often a prickly, although loving, one as their own ideals were at times at odds with one another. This was never more apparent than with the publication of Tenant, which Charlotte thought was ill-considered and unseemly.

Time has shown Tenant to be the most blisteringly telling novel of the sisters, a searing indictment of the treatment of women by their husbands and the society which afforded them no rights of their own. Anne was often seen as the meekest of the sisters, but her novel tells another story - and of one who was willfully misunderstood by one of her own.

This book attempts to shed some light on the complexities of the Brontës, and reveal them as more than ciphers marred by tragedy. It also gives Anne her due, long deserved.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great book!! I really loved it. Highly recommend.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but somewhat melodramatic as the author decides to embody the spirit of Anne Brontë and dramatise scenes of her life as if he were also there.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best biography of Anne I have ever read. It really gives an insight into her unique personality: brave, strong, modest, determined, intellectual, moral, all qualities contrary to the whitewashed image Charlotte would have the public believe of a frail, delicate, unworldly spinster. Such an image is at odds with the reality of a woman capable of writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which depicts an abusive marriage in all of its ugliness and brutality. There is a real insight into Anne's inner life and torments. Her romance with William Weightman is handled with particular sensitivity as is the downfall of her brother Branwell into an haze of opium and debauchery. Anne has been overlooked for too long and here she finally comes into her own.

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5
Very disappointing, but to be honest I suspected it might be!
That's mainly because it isn't long since I read the truly excellent Claire Harman biography of Charlotte Brontë and this is a pale imitation.
I spotted several minor errors which a decent researcher/editor would never have let slip through. And there's really nothing new to be learned at all - just a mish mash of earlier biographies and Holland's view of what might or might not have been said.
I also disliked the writing style - like an English teacher speaking to a class that isn't really interested, almost as if the reader was a bit simple.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a wonderful, engaging read, which fleshes out Anne as a character who has often been forgotten or downplayed as an author, even as a person, in the constructions of Bronte biography/history. My only caveat would be the issue of occasional psychogenic explanations of the family's illnesses/diseases, an issue of which people who know my own critiques of this will be aware of my misgivings. But nevertheless this was a very enjoyable book indeed, one of those which make one sorry when it's finished!

[Lynette Koh Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

A succinct and engaging biography of Anne and her family which helped me understand why Anne wrote the way she did. What I found most beautiful about the Brontes was their determined anonymity, what is most tragic are their early deaths soon after their publications. How awful that their father lived through all his six children's deaths. I am glad that their works remain to this day, how much more they would have written if only they had the chance!
Great read, I highly recommend.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is Bronte fan boy speculative biography. Now go read “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

[Amy Drozdowicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to be honest from the outset. I enjoyed this on a fantastical level, but I cannot recommend it as a biography. Nick Holland’s passion for Anne is clear, but unregulated. It is natural to speculate as to a historical figure’s innermost musings and motivations, but a biography is no place for these projections to be voiced. Holland frequently presents conjecture as if it is fact, which proves detrimental to the reliability of the text as a whole. He additionally forcefully projects his romanticised idea of Anne into the text, spending entirely too much time preoccupied with her thought process – the one thing we cannot possibly know and should only ever speculate on. Rather than supposing that Anne felt a certain way, Holland insists declaratively that she did feel a certain way with no proof other than his own preference. It is natural to project our own feelings onto a historical figure, especially one we are disposed to recommend to others, but this projection does not belong in a factual text. Perhaps this work would have been better suited as a hybrid of biography and historical fiction, with a chapter illustrating merely the facts followed by a chapter of Holland’s perception in prose. There are also stylistic problems with In Search of Anne Brontë, with phrases being repeated too frequently to go unnoticed, facts becoming confused (the most glaring error is Linton being described as the alcoholic in Wuthering Heights rather than Hindley), and a penchant for melodrama which grows irritating.

After reading that paragraph, my 3 star rating might surprise you. As I said earlier, I did enjoy this book on a purely fantastical level. I suspended my disbelief, only taking the cited facts as facts, and indulged Holland’s fantasy for the remainder. In so doing, I had a pretty good time. I stayed up until midnight on Sunday blasting through the last half of the book in one sitting. Perhaps it is because I am not usually a fan of biographies. I wouldn’t recommend In Search of Anne Brontë for academic consideration, but it’s a relaxed form of biography that could work effectively as a light, if not slightly fictionalised, introduction to Anne.

Full review (including paragraphs where I wax lyrical about how much I love Anne) is on my blog here: https://riddellreads.wordpress.com/20...

[Mary Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this biography of Anne Bronte that made her and her family come alive. I know many reviewers did not like conjecture but I like the way it read like a novel. This one is a keeper and I look forward to reading more about Anne, Emily and Charlotte. I have only read Anne’s “Agnes Grey” and her poetry and cannot wait to read “Tenant of Wildfell Hall”. Nick Holland writes “Anne’s final letter is a masterpiece of patience, faith and compassion.” These adjectives describe the way she lived her life.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sits a bit between strict biography and biographical fiction at times, but as someone who knew next to nothing about the personal life of the Brontës, I enjoyed this book that put Anne in the spotlight.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for a serious biography of Anne Brontë, preferably one that broke new ground. Unfortunately, this really wasn't it. It often reads more like a novel than a biography:

Charlotte pushed the letter on to the table with a thud and slipped it across to Anne, too angry to trust herself to speak.

****

This news came as a devastating blow to Branwell. He pictured his erstwhile employer having one final laugh from beyond the grave...

These may be entirely accurate depictions of what actually happened, but they are not the cold, hard facts I expect from a biographer. Similarly, I wonder how much basis the author has for claims such as that Charlotte borrowed from Agnes Grey or that she modeled Jane Eyre on Anne. Throughout, I found his enthusiasm for Anne's works somewhat excessive. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall might be a lot of things, but it's hardly "an undoubted masterpiece" that deserves to be ranked alongside Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Nor do I think criticisms of it as coarse and unrealistic are unfair as the author maintains. Frankly, I think the author would have done better to just write a fictionalized account of Anne's life and put his flair for melodrama to good use.

[Michael Bully · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am fairly new to reading and researching the Brontes so not qualified to comment on the historical accuracy of all the statements that the author has made.
Get the impression that the author is very much advocating for Anne Bronte, and being fair Mr Holland provides quite a lot of background information concerning the Bronte family as a whole. Sometimes he appears as over familiar with the details of family's life -such as claiming that Charlotte did not speak to Branwell for two years. Yet the underlying purpose appears to be arguing that Anne Bronte's poems and her two novels 'Agnes Grey' and 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' deserves the same level of acclaim that has been awarded to the more famous work of her siblings such as 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Jane Eyre'. Personally agree that 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a remarkable book : It's portrayal of a lead female character escaping a toxic marriage , gaining a degree of independence then eventual happiness, is striking. This biography also focuses on Anne Bronte's controversial interpretation of Christianity, namely that salvation is universal and punishment for sins is not everlasting. But somehow an element is missing.....should the novels of any author be graded according to what they teach us -the 'didactic' approach? As a reader, I am not sure that I read literature for the purposes of moral instruction. But on the other hand I read this biography twice, it has helped me gain some entry into the world of the Brontes. So will give the book four stars.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable, and a good attempt to redress the balance of interest in the fiction of the sisters in favour of Anne. However quite a lot of this reads more like biographical fiction than biography. There's a lot of speculative writing about feelings, staring at the floor, etc. which reads more like a novel, and some of it doesn't seem to be supported by evidence (such as the episode at Roe Head where Charlotte refuses to acknowledge Anne - where does this come from?) The author is very enthusiastic about his subject, though, and might just have pushed me back towards rereading her novels.

[Thom · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have to agree with the naysayers. On the one hand, this is an entertaining read for those who know little of Anne's life. However, there are SO many fanciful opinions and unfounded assumptions that I cannot recommend this book to anyone. Furthermore, the writer appears to know very little about that period of time.

This is, at best, a fan's broad, romantic speculation about Anne. If it had been labeled as historical fiction, I'd have given it 4 stars. As a biography, it fails - big time. I kept reading because I thought it might improve. It did not. What a waste of time this was...

[Penelope Hemingway · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some sloppy writing in there. Needed another edit. I could have done with quotes, sometimes rather than passing mentions of things, however well referenced. Nothing new here and it doesn't surpass Gerin. Not that I disliked it, though. Where it was interesting, was in the angle taken re Charlotte being the shaper and arbiter of Anne's legacy as a writer, which was a good point well made.

Anne's spirituality is a key part of understanding her, and I thought the writer did a good job of conveying this, if over simplifying at times.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
There were points where it went a bit too far into speculation for my liking, but it was a pretty interesting read. I haven't had any previous experience with Bronte biographies though, so I don't know if that would change my opinion.

[Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

im an anne brontë stan now, she is my idol in all things

[Gerri Bauer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Bronte fans, run, don't walk, to this book. It's a wonderful exploration of this often-overlooked Bronte's life. I've long been a fan of her writing, and I consider Tenant of Wildfell Hall second only to Jane Eyre (maybe on par with) and definitely better than Wuthering Heights. She was so ahead of her time that her books almost fell into obscurity because of story elements controversial in her day.

As some other reviewers mentioned, I didn't favor the author's occasional assumptions about Anne's thoughts at a given moment. But it's a minor quibble. I'm delighted to see Anne getting the attention she deserves.

This author also writes an Anne Bronte blog, which is how I learned about this book.

[D.M. Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first encounter with the Brontës began at the age of ten or eleven when my mother gave me her beautiful 1946 editions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre with columned text and exquisite engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. Eventually, I discovered there was another author-sister in the family, the youngest, Anne. From the multitude of documentaries about the Brontës, movies based on Charlotte’s and Emily’s books, and even, as an English major, classic literature courses in school, it was all too easy to overlook Anne’s presence in and influence on literature and the Brontë story.

A travesty, indeed!

Quietly enduring, persevering, unpretentious people often don’t come across as accomplished or potentially so. As a writer myself, I’m constantly drawn to creative figures in history that somehow and for whatever reasons have been set aside as less important and appealing than others. In researching my own Anne Brontë project, I’ve been surprised and delighted to discover so many others motivated to make Anne’s more intimate acquaintance. Following in the footsteps of Winifred Gerin and Edward Chitham, Nick Holland, an active member of the Brontë Society, has turned his fascination with Anne into an eloquent, informative, affecting, and perceptive biography that like his blog, annebronte.org, is another important step in bringing her out of disregard and misconception.

There will always remain secrets about Anne Brontë. All of her childhood writings and most of her letters have been lost. Mr. Holland has drawn from documented facts, the interpretations of other biographers, diary papers Anne and Emily wrote, Charlotte’s letters and recorded remembrances, but, also, essentially, Anne’s verse and prose writing that offer many clues to who she was, why she wrote as she did, and how she lived and died.

In Search of Anne Brontë is a sensitively formed account of her life, the book’s slow, reflective, and conscientiously investigative style apropos to Anne’s character, intellect, and spirit. There is clarity and affection in its pages, an engaging examination of how her surroundings and relationships shaped, challenged and inspired her, a confirmation of her gentle, introspective, spiritual, mediating character. Anyone who gets to know Anne Brontë as thoroughly as Mr. Holland has, realizes there was so much more to her, including a strength and individualism that took her away from Haworth and family to do her duty; which resulted in the channeling of her expanded awareness and experience into the honesty, prowess, and courage of her poetry and novels.

As Mr. Holland and other Anne Brontë aficionados appreciate, she was endearing for her quiet, sweet, kind manner, but going in deeper lifts her out of the shadows cast by her more well-known and dramatic sisters and brother and the often over-emphasized isolation and tragedy of their lives. Yes, Anne’s life was brief and at times difficult, a struggle with loneliness, self-doubt and loss, but also full of imagination, love, music, nature, friendship, freedom and discovery. It was, after all, fully lived. If you haven’t read any other biography about Anne Brontë, this one is a perfect way to be introduced to her. If you have, you will, as I did, find Mr. Holland’s fresh perspective, devoted understanding and intense respect for his subject make you even more appreciative of what a remarkably intelligent, caring, brave, and beyond-her-time woman and writer she was.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I enjoyed this. Holland is probably overly imaginative and melodramatic here and there, but his opinions are thoughtful and add dimension, relatability, and solidity to Anne, who has not always received as much scutiny as the rest of her family. This highlights her individual life experiences in ways different from her siblings, and describes the mindset she likely would have had as the youngest family member. He is accused of leveling too much speculation, but it illustrated his points. Biographers usually avoid making assumptions in order to be academically responsible, but being too cautious can also be uninformative and boring. He draws Anne as a self-sacrificing, almost saint, which sounds exaggerated; however, the depiction is sympathetic. She is usually compared to her sisters as the less talented underdog, but by any measure, she very successfully achieved her goals among many challenges. She was disciplined, knowledgeable, broke new ground with exemplary writing and realism, and was certainly the most likable. Anne flew under the radar because it appears she accepted secondary status and didn't demand attention and recognition. It comes across that her family often took her affability for granted, and her impressive achievements were downplayed, then and now. If she hadn't had two sisters' famous works to be compared to, would her novels have been evaluated differently, assuming they'd gotten published? Holland argues from Anne's points of view to give her many accomplishments more credit than is usually attributed. He persuaded me.

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I am mostly just glad that Anne has another book about her - she is definitely the least remembered of the sisters and her works are the least lauded. That being said, this book is 99% speculation based on Anne's works of fiction. I do agree that there are indisputable autobiographical links in her works, but I do not think we will ever know how much is Anne herself and how much was her imagination. If only her diaries and other writings were not destroyed...what a sad mystery! This biography was simple and interesting, dispite the creative liberties (inaccuracies?) that Holland takes. Good food for thought.