Some Brontë fans-reader, I’m one of them-would happily work through stacks of Brontë midrash in search of answers to the mysterium tremendum, the awesome mystery, of the Brontës’ improbable sainthood. Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s forays into the marketplace of female labor gave them their best material.
You could call the Gospels a midrash on the Hebrew Bible, the lives of the saints a midrash on the Christ story, the Koran a midrash on all of the above. Midrash isn’t just a Jewish hermeneutic, by the way.
What are Peoples of the Book, after all, if not irrepressible embroiderers of fetishized texts? The Jews have a word for the feverish imaginings that run like bright threads through their Torah commentaries: midrash, the spinning of gloriously weird backstories or fairy tales prompted by gaps or contradictions in the narratives. I see no reason not to consider the Brontë cult a religion. Last year’s highlights included a young-adult novelization of Emily’s adolescence and a book of insightful essays called The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which uses items belonging to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne as wormholes to the 19th century and the lost texture of their existence.
In the U.S., there is a new Charlotte Brontë biography by Claire Harman a Brontë-themed literary detective novel a novelistic riff on Jane Eyre whose heroine is a serial killer a collection of short stories inspired by that novel’s famous line *, “Reader, I married him” and a fan-fiction-style “autobiography” of Nelly Dean, the servant-narrator of Wuthering Heights. This year the Brontë literary-industrial complex celebrates the bicentennial of Charlotte’s birth, and British and American publishers have been especially busy. “Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, hardly a year has gone by without some form of biographical material on the Brontës appearing-from articles in newspapers to full-length lives, from images on tea towels to plays, films, and novelizations,” wrote Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth, her 2001 history of Brontëmania. N o body of writing has engendered more other bodies of writing than the Bible, but the Brontë corpus comes alarmingly close.
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