Bronte

From the start, this fictionalized biography of the Bronte family wraps us in a stiff, damp Yorkshire wind and leads us into the moldy propriety of a late Victorian parsonage of straitened means. The sisters Bronte--Charlotte, Emily and Anne--and their brother, Branwell, form the central knot of a family plagued by chill weather, financial woes and galloping consumption. Yet they forge a warmth of their own through the idiosyncratic bonds of siblings and the furious glow of shared creativity. Emily is wily and impetuous; Branwell a weak-willed artist who becomes an alcoholic; Charlotte a wallflower whose soul seethes not only with creativity but also with religious guilt over her literary ""lies."" Hughes (The Antique Collector) fleshes out this remarkable family with a careful balance of established fact and inventive intuition. He identifies the forces that shaped the lives and work of these parson's daughters while allowing allusions to the works themselves to inform the tale. Hughes is employing a tricky form, a sort of mutation of the New Journalism. Instead of bringing fictional techniques to nonfiction, he brings some biographical techniques to fiction about real people. Much of the book, then, reads more like biography, as Hughes relies on the accumulation and juxtaposition--rather than the dramatization--of events. A measure of his success is that his book is no less engrossing for this gambit. (Oct.)