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Article: The Writer Trapped in The Woman
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- January 29, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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CHARLOTTE BRONTE A Passionate Life By Lyndall Gordon Norton.
418 pp. $27.50
LYNDALL GORDON'S intensely felt and argued biography of Charlotte
Bronte has a thesis to prove: Bronte was not a withered, consumptive
old maid living out a frustrated life tyrannized by her frightful old
father in a damp, unhealthy parsonage. What Gordon, the author of
biographies of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, sets out to do is re-
invent her subject as a woman of powerful, fiery intellect and
emotions, who chose to conform to contemporary mores.
The five Bronte sisters, whose short lives have been extensively
documented, were raised by their widowed father in the bleak village
of Haworth high on the ...