The Brontës: Charlotte and Emily

by Laura Hinkley

From the book-jacket:
This penetrating study of the ever fascinating Brontës follows the vital connective thread between their life and work, and from one work to another, more closely and more surely than has hitherto been attempted. With sound scholarship and rare sensitivity, the author traces definitely and in detail the steps by which the experience of the strange, moor-born sisters was transmuted into their poems and novels.

The early days at Haworth Parsonage when the children absorbed the moors, had their first encounter with death, and lived in a half-world of legend of their own invention, throw much light on their subsequent development. From these beginnings the reader follows the internal growth as well as the external careers of each of the four Brontës; the gentle Anne, the dissolute Branwell, lost in a long courtship of death, the practical Charlotte, who alone came to terms with life, and the Gothic Emily who translated her lonely experience to an unearthly plane.

In the final section of the book each of the novels of the two most famous of the sisters is analyzed in detail, with diagrams charting the sources from which a single character is drawn.
The result is a brilliantly executed journey into the lives and minds of Charlotte and Emily that explores the very processes of genius which produced in one case Jane Eyre, that proud, unhesitating assertion of women's feelings for man, and in the other, the ageless fire of Wuthering Heights.

Laura L Hinckley, who lives in California, was a teacher before she became a writer. Her stories and articles have appeared in leading magazines and she has had a play on Broadway. Enthralled by the Brontës since childhood, her serious biographical interest dates back some fourteen years. Charlotte and Emily is the fruit of long, conscientious research and mature critical judgment.

376 pages, Textbook Binding

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Laura Lois Hinkley (1875-1949) was the oldest daughter of Myron Edward Hinkley and Ann Williams Briggs Hinkley. She was born in Marcus, Iowa and grew up there with her sisters Blanche and Mary and her brother, Vern. Their parents earned their living as pioneer farmers. The three young sisters prepared themselves to be teachers. In 1899 the entire Hinkley family moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa so that the children could attend Cornell College there.

Laura had always been an avid reader, and as a young woman she began writing short stories. Writing came easily to her. Laura had 45 short stories accepted for publication in magazines during the years from 1903 to 1921. She also wrote several novels though none were ever published. One of Laura's stories, "Craven", which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1912, was later adapted into a Broadway play in 1918 called "Another Man's Shoes."

In 1942 Laura and her sister Blanche moved to Pacific Palisades, California where Laura lived for the rest of her life. Shortly after the move to California Laura began research for some biographies she was planning to write. The three biographies that followed were by far her greatest success in published writing. These were "Charlotte and Emily" (1945), "Ladies of Literature" (1946) and "The Stevensons — Louis and Fanny" (published in 1950 after her death).