Short answer: Start with Jane Eyre (Charlotte) if you want passion with a moral spine, or Wuthering Heights (Emily) if you want passion with no spine at all — wild, amoral, elemental. Then read Anne, the unfairly forgotten third sister, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s great biography to understand the strangest family in English literature.
Three sisters, one parsonage, an impossible amount of genius
It is one of the most improbable facts in literary history: three sisters, raised in isolation on the Yorkshire moors in a clergyman’s house, who between them wrote several of the greatest novels in English and then died, one after another, young. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published first under male pseudonyms — Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — because the literary world would not take women seriously. The work that came out of that bleak parsonage burns with an intensity nothing in their quiet lives explains.
Charlotte: passion governed by conscience
Jane Eyre is where most readers should begin — the story of a poor, plain, fiercely independent governess who refuses to be anyone’s mistress or anyone’s victim. It fuses gothic romance with a radical insistence on a woman’s moral and emotional autonomy, and it is an irresistible read. If it takes hold, Charlotte’s other novels — the underrated Villette and the social novel Shirley — show the full range of her mind.
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Emily: passion beyond good and evil
Then brace yourself for Wuthering Heights, which is like nothing else ever written — a love story that is also a horror story, peopled by characters as cruel and elemental as the weather, chief among them the unforgettable Heathcliff. Emily wrote only one novel and made it a thunderclap.
Anne: the moral conscience of the family
Don’t skip Anne, the quietest and most morally serious sister, long dismissed and now rightly reclaimed. Begin with Agnes Grey, her clear-eyed account of a governess’s humiliations, drawn from her own life.
Then the real story
To understand them all, read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë — one of the great biographies, written by a friend, and the book that created the Brontë legend.
The easiest way to have them all
If the sisters take hold — and they will — the complete novels of all three in one volume is the collection to live with.
Get The Brontë Sisters: The Complete Novels →
Related reading: Wuthering Heights: Love, Violence, and Dissolution · Heathcliff: Hero, Villain, or Something Worse? · The Life of Charlotte Brontë
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