"Miss Austen and Thackeray have admirers; Charlotte Bronte has worshippers." So it seemed to one critic half a century after her death. But it was less the novels than the life itself that stirred the public imagination. The lonely genius of the Yorkshire moors and her doomed sisters, Emily and Anne, touched a romantic nerve. So much so that Henry James was driven to complain that the Brontee legend had "fairly elbowed out" "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights". A photograph in Claire Harman's excellent new bicentennial biography, of a crowd jostling towards the Brontee parsonage when it first opened to the public in 1928, seems to bear him out.
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