Böcker av Edward Chitham

In this landmark new biography the leading critic Edward Chitham offers a contemporary account of the life and work of the English novelist and poet Anne Brontë (1820-49), the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.

Biographical material on Emily Bronte is scarce. In the past, biographers have taken this as an excuse to portray intuition as fact, creating a confused and inaccurate image of the author of Wuthering Heights. In A Life of Emily Bronte, Edward Chitham searches diligently for the truth. He describes his book as an 'investigative biography', delving into Emily's childhood, her relationships with her family, her father's Irish roots, and the influences of her friends and acquaintances. Using material neglected by other biographers, Chitham makes an illuminating and scholarly study of the events and characters that shaped Emily's inspiration - a puzzle that has confounded many and made her, up to this point, an enigmatic and misrepresented figure.

Title on spine: Brontee facts & Brontee problems.

The Irish heritage of the Bronte family has long been overlooked, partly because both Charlotte and her father Patrick did their very best to ensure that this was the case and partly because there was a strong understanding at the end of the nineteenth century that the Brontes were Yorkshire regional novelists.

This book provides a rounded account of the history of Dudley, starting before the Norman Conquest. It traces the development of industry in the town, and shows how the lack of utilities, including water, hampered the nineteenth-century town and forced a section of the population into desperate poverty.

By the late nineteenth century the Black Country had become one of the most intensely industrialised areas of the nation: the South Staffordshire coal mines, the coal coking operations, and the iron foundries and steel mills that used the local coal to fire their furnaces, produced a level of air pollution that had few equals anywhere in the world. Indeed, Charles Dickens described how the area's local factory chimneys 'Poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air'. Also, the anchors and chains for the ill-fated liner RMS Titanic were manufactured in the Black Country in the area of Netherton. However, the history of the area stretches far further back than its industrial past. This book traces the origins of the area from its earliest inhabitants, through the Middle Ages, and up to the present day. Many towns are featured in the book, e.g. Halesowen, Kingswinford, Stourbridge, Tipton, Walsall, Wednesbury, West Bromwich , Dudley, Warley, Blackheath and Brownhills.

This new book on the Brontes concentrates on the way in which the literary interests and expressions of Charlotte and Emily were built up. It makes use of recent research into background and reading matter to investigate the development of the authors' poetry and novels.