THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503140266
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Short : 40 lines
CHARLOTTE BRONTE
A Passionate Life
LYNDALL GORDON
W.W. Norton. 418 pp. $27.95.
BIOGRAPHER Lyndall Gordon's new book about the author of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life, asks contemporary questions as it recounts her familiar Victorian life story. The result is a portrait of a writer more heroic than doomed; passionate, stubborn, even subversive; one who lived and worked according to her own vision, despite the suffocating strictures laid upon her. In the light of Gordon's modern thinking, Charlotte, the oldest of the literary Bronte sisters, transcends her recluse-dying-on-the-moor legend to become a strong, fiery woman of independent mind.
In March 1837, Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) penned a now-famous reply to British poet laureate Robert Southey, who rebuked her poetry as an unfeminine pursuit. It began: ``In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts.'' While at first blush this sentiment may appear to be the proper one for a young Victorian lady, Gordon, who has written biographies of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, suggests that Bronte merely assumed such a mask, perhaps with an ironic smile, all the while aware of the deftness of her parry.
The evidence Gordon accumulates - letters, juvenilia, etc. - is the same as that examined by previous Charlotte Bronte biographers, the most notable being Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and contemporary. But Gordon's cast is distinctly modern as she enhances the Bronte mythology. by CNB