`Whether it is right or advisable to create things like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is," wrote Charlotte Bronte in her preface to a posthumous edition of her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights. That even a loving sister and fellow-writer could be so ambivalent explains to some degree why the Brontes were dragged with extreme reluctance into the limelight when their cover as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was blown.
They weren't interested in fame - but their books were considered so strange and shocking that they became not only famous but notorious as well, the object of intense curiosity. When the rather disappointing truth about their identities and circumstances was discovered - that they were retiring young women living the quiet existence of daughters of a humble parsonage - curiosity turned to prurience. What had been their experience that they could write those "coarse" and "immoral" works? How could respectable young ladies know so much? Enter Charlotte, the only surviving sister, shortly followed by Mrs Gaskell, her friend, to apologise and explain. A myth was born; and so little of substance could be said about the Brontes that they lent themselves wonderfully to a myth that could be adapted and adjusted according to the agendas of succeeding generations.
Charlotte, as concerned with respectability as any mid-Victorian, was at pains to defend Emily as a Romantic genius, presenting her as little more than a child in the helpless grip of divine inspiration. This saddled the author of Wuthering Heights with a mystification that worked to her disadvantage, down to F.R. Leavis's refusal to admit her to his canon on the grounds that her book "came from nowhere". But it did make her a heady and charismatic figure for later generations whenever spirituality and mysticism were in vogue.
The reality is, however, that Wuthering Heights did not come from nowhere. It shows various influences from Byron, Scott and the German Romantics to Bulwer-Lytton's Eugene Aram. As for Emily - the ethereal visionary that popular culture has preferred to portray - it is illuminating to know that it was her logical ability that her German professor most admired, while Charlotte, until she stumbled on her sister's poetry, had thought it was as an essayist she would make her mark. And it was Emily who was the most domestic of the three, who liked to be in the kitchen, baking, and peeling potatoes.
It was a long time, however, before the mythical Emily came into her own. The Victorians were only interested in Charlotte because, thanks to Mrs Gaskell, she could be made to fit the ideals of the time. As a novelist of the more prosaic kind, Mrs Gaskell, from her first acquaintance with Charlotte, was fascinated by the idea of the Brontes as mediated by her own Gaskellish imagination. With her Life of Charlotte Bronte, she invented you could say the genre of The Brontes: the Fiction that, but for the brilliance of their own fictions, might have eclipsed them - though it persists in a multitude of manifestations on stage and screen and in the theme-park kitschiness of Haworth, their home town, to this very day.
It was Mrs Gaskell who gave us the gloomily romantic - and of course the preferred - image of Haworth as an isolated village huddled in a brooding and windswept landscape, and a parsonage deprived of worldly comforts but therefore, also, liberated from the mundane. The real Haworth was a thriving smoky industrial town with several mills, 12 grocers, six pubs and heaps of sewage in the streets. To sanitise Charlotte, as well as to indulge her own world-view, Mrs Gaskell recreated her as a kind of saint, the devoted daughter, sister, friend and wife, backgrounding her work and ignoring the person who could robustly dismiss her pupils as "fatheaded oafs" who made her want to vomit. It was Mrs Gaskell who, needing a villain or two, cast Mr Bronte in the role (though he seems to have been a pretty exemplary father of geniuses), brother Branwell as a spectre of vice, and the sisters as misfortunates and victims - though saintly, despite all.
And SO it went on. In time Emily's enthusiasts would present Charlotte-as-bitch and Branwell would have his advocates to claim it was really he who wrote Wuthering Heights. Only Anne, it seems, has yet to be worked over, and since we are no less subject than were previous generations to attempting to possess our heroes by imposing our values and desires on them, from the Brontes to Sylvia Plath, she needn't consider herself safe. This propensity is really the subject of Lucasta Miller's erudite and engagingly jargon-free investigation. It's one the Brontes had no time for. To them, we have a right only to their books.
Anne Haverty's most recent novel is The Far Side of a Kiss