A triumph—it’s hard to imagine anyone else ever again getting quite this close to the Brontës.
A massive, almost certainly definitive biography that both demystifies and restores one of England’s most legendary literary families.
In this updated, entirely revised version of her 1994 biography, Barker (Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, 1417-1450, 2012, etc.) completely submerges herself in the world of her subjects, delivering a rich, illuminating group portrait of the real and imaginative lives of a family of writers: the father, Patrick Brontë, a Church of England parson, and his children: Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their legendary if lesser-known brother Branwell, a poet and painter. (Two other children died young.) Barker knows the Brontës and their 19th-century world on an intimate basis, almost as if she breathes the clammy air of the Haworth parsonage where they lived. She knows what they read and how they imagined. Barker pays especially close attention to the contemporary journalism, which had a demonstrable impact on the Brontës' own fantasy worlds of Angria and Gondal. The Brontës would, in turn, become myths themselves. Indeed, part of Barker’s ambition is to save the family from its legend. Her particular nemesis is the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose 1857 classic The Life of Charlotte Brontë, writes Barker, whitewashed Charlotte’s life, ignored or misread the lives of her siblings and depicted Patrick as a cranky, eccentric tyrant. Barker sees Charlotte as a selfish, manipulative literary genius; Patrick, the book’s major figure, is convincingly rendered as a dominant but loving father and a pioneer of liberal reform. While not a critical biography, Barker doggedly traces the inspiration of all the novels and, especially in Charlotte's case, astutely matches fiction to fact.
A triumph—it’s hard to imagine anyone else ever again getting quite this close to the Brontës.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-365-3
Page Count: 1184
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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