e-book of Juliet Barker biography

Here's my review of the second edition, in Kindle format, of Juliet Barker's The Brontes: Wild Genius on the Moors.

Thanks for posting and reviewing this book. I have been looking for biography of the Brontes.

I received a print copy for Christmas. I have only read the first few pages because that sent me on a quest after Irish history. I had never really thought a whole lot about their Irish roots before, but I do think it explains a few things.

3>> For example....

(i) both Charlotte and her father were great admirers of the Duke of Wellington, who himself was Anglo-Irish;

(ii) in Shirley, Charlotte pokes rather nasty fun at the Irish curate, Peter Augustus Malone;

(iii) Charlotte's own husband-to-be (who was not the model for Shirley's Rev. Malone), Arthur Bell Nichols, was himself Irish-born and retired to Ireland after Charlotte's death;

(iv) Patrick P[B?]runty's change of name to Bronté (the dieresis, Brontë, came later), and it may (though not necessarily) have derived from Horatio Nelson, who was made Duke of Brontë in the Neapolitan peerage.

There is, incidentally, a book The Brontës in Ireland; or Facts stranger than fiction (1894), which is available in e-book form, but its accuracy is generally doubtful and it's much more myth than fact.