A fictional, almost biographical account of Charlotte Brontë's life, this novel begins in the year 1846 with Charlotte in Manchester by her father's bedside as he recovers from eye surgery. As she sits with her father during long, tedious days and nights, she finds the time and inspiration to write her novel, Jane Eyre. The story continues from here to recount the challenges of publishing her work along with her sisters Emily and Anne while caring for their alcoholic, depressed brother Branwell and assisting their blind father. Flashbacks of their past experiences enable the reader to see a connection to their writing and to the characters in their books.
The Brontë sisters led very tragic, short lives but it was difficult in this book to connect entirely with them. Written from a very impersonal, third person point of view, with little dialogue, Charlotte is referred to as "she" and her father as "he", although the author uses the present tense. "Sitting by her blinded, silenced father, she dares to take up her pencil and write for the first time in her own voice. She writes from experience, using what she knows of life, of literature, of love, plunging into the midst of her tale, not wasting the reader's time with lengthy preliminaries."
In the end, when Charlotte dies, I felt little empathy or sadness, so tersely was the ending written, as though just stating a fact. "Within nine months of this wedding day, her father and her husband will stand by her corpse. They will remain shackled together, as her father once was with her aunt. They will bury her in the same church."
Overall, this was an informative novel but lacked the ability to involve the reader in the thoughts and feelings of the characters or their tragic destiny.
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