Susan Eilenberg

Juliet Barker’s The Brontës is an uneasy work. It seeks to defend the family it takes as its subject against those who sought to invade its privacy: the Victorian reading public, with its prurient speculations about the mysterious authors Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; meddling acquaintances whose reports fuelled those speculations; previous biographers who exploited those reports; close friends such as Ellen Nussey who defied Charlotte’s husband Arthur Nicholls and refused to burn the letters Charlotte sent her; even Charlotte herself, who, by reading her sister Emily’s poems, violated her privacy and thus allied herself with the intruders and the voyeurs. As a biographer and as a scholar of the Brontë family – she was for many years curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum – Ms Barker has a stake in Charlotte’s accidental discovery and in Nussey’s obstinacy, even in the salacious speculation she deplores. But her sympathies are with Nicholls, threatening censorship, and with Emily, secretive and outraged. Too conscientious to withhold information, she proceeds only after reminding us that the privacy she seems to violate had in fact been violated long since by those she charges with ignorance, malice and greed. This makes for embarrassing reading.’

Once regarded as among the most distinguished poets in England, admired by Johnson, envied by Goldsmith, praised by Wordsworth, and read by everyone, Anna Letitia Barbauld has this last century or two thoroughly sunk into oblivion. Until recently, all that was remembered about her was an anecdote in Coleridge’s Table Talk, in which she figured, ingloriously, as the stooge whose miscomprehension of The Ancient Mariner provoked his comparison between that poem and the tale in the Arabian Nights of the genie, the merchant and the date shells. Even this anecdote was more likely to inspire debate about whether dates have shells than about the identity of Mrs Barbauld.