It is one of the strangest facts in the history of literature: three sisters, in a cold parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, raised by a widowed clergyman father, produced within a couple of years three of the most enduring novels in the language — and published them, at first, under men’s names, because no one would take a woman novelist seriously.
This volume gathers the three masterpieces side by side. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, the passionate first-person cry of a plain woman who insists on her own worth. Emily’s Wuthering Heights, wilder and stranger than anything else in Victorian fiction, a storm of love and revenge on the moors. And Anne’s Agnes Grey, quieter but unflinching, the truest account ever written of the misery of a Victorian governess. Read together, they are a single astonishing act of the imagination, three temperaments turning the same narrow life into three utterly different worlds.
Charlotte would outlive both her sisters and shape the legend; Emily would die at thirty, having written one novel; Anne, long underrated, is only now being seen for the clear, brave writer she was. Together they remain the most remarkable family in English letters.
Read on with the structure of Wuthering Heights and the secret of Jane Eyre.
Read The Brontë Sisters: The Complete Novels →
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