The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte: The Secret History of the Mysterious Events at Haworth

Announcing itself as the “secret history of the mysterious events at Haworth”, James Tully’s The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte returns to a fascinating episodes in English literary history: the lives, and deaths, of the Bronte family. Falling (sometimes uneasily) between fiction and history, the book uncovers a murder mystery at the heart of Haworth. The discovery of a confidential journal belonging to Martha Brown, a servant in the Bronte household, is the device which gets the story going: blackmail, poisoning, pregnancy and murder–all the stuff of gothic mystery and of this ingenious, if often infuriating, tale. Infuriating because this book hates Charlotte Bronte; it behaves as if the myth of the “almost saint-like sisters” were still in place(it isn’t, and hasn’t been for years) and so skews its fictional interpretation through the image of a Victorian virago. “It was not Charlotte’s fault that she was short, thin and plain,” Tully reassures his readers; “all I am trying to do is peel away some of the layers of myth which have built up around her”. The flat prose of Brown’s journal is the means to demystify, to create another fictional Charlotte by returning to the “shadowy figure” (as Juliet Barker describes him) of Arthur Nicholls, Charlotte Bronte’s husband. The historical questions which surround him, and Brown, are genuinely compelling: there is a story to be told there, but not this one. –Vicky Lebeau