Review of The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte by James Tully

If you devour tales of murder mixed with deception, you can now accompany crime investigator James Tully on a journey full of scandalous revelations. Also if you imagined that writers of the past led pathetic dark lives, here is your chance to believe it.

Tully became fascinated by the inconsistencies he found in the accounts of the lives and deaths of the Brontes and soon became enmeshed in seeking out the mysteries of Haworth (where the sisters spent most of their lives).

The story of the lives of the Bronte family is as haunting and tragic as their novels. The tale of three sisters and their alcoholic brother shut in a bleak and claustrophobic parsonage makes interesting reading, though very often you wonder if you can indeed believe all that you read. Tully also makes use of Martha, who worked at the parsonage during that time, to add credibility.

At this point, however, I’d like to warn others who like myself had Emily Bronte on a list of favourite authors after reading the passionate tale of Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights. But if you intend to ignore my warning and continue reading, I’d only be too glad to perform the sadistic task of letting you know that Wuthering Heights wasn’t a product of Emily Bronte’s imagination.

Now I shall return to the beginning, where we are introduced to an autocratic Charlotte Bronte, a milder Emily Bronte and a lovesick Anne Bronte. Little is said about Mr. Branwell, their brother, who had a past that one wouldn’t be too proud of. History seldom mentions this intelligent young man who supposedly drank himself to death. The Bronte siblings apparently began writing with the hope of acquiring fame and fortune. Charlotte, the obvious leader who lived till the age of forty, enjoyed the literary fame that the others didn’t live to see.

The main protagonist of this book, however, is Arthur Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband. The Bronte clan was never the same after the arrival of Nicholls, a young, handsome and highly ambitious priest with a wild sexual appetite. It was his affair with Emily that encouraged her into stealing the plot of Wuthering Heights. On her death, his interest shifted to Charlotte, who was as ambitious as he was. She was his stairway to fortune and he was the man she wanted to rule over and love.

In the book, Tully makes quite a few shocking revelations about how three sisters living in a remote parsonage knew so much about the darker passions of love. There are doubts over whether Nicholls’s relationship with Emily resulted in her pregnancy. Was Branwell an expert blackmailer or did he have more to his credit? And was Anne poisoned to stop her revealing the truth about Emily's death?

All of this leads to just one question: was there a cold- blooded and calculating murderer at the heart of the Bronte household?

An interesting read, though I’d rather forget about it in time. It will not feature in anyone’s ‘must read’ list, but it is difficult not to pick up a book that promises action from the beginning to the end. And it is more interesting knowing that these writers, who have become immortalised through their books, weren’t exactly all that perfect.

Tully doesn’t try to impress the reader with an addition of a few metaphors. His limitations as a writer are obvious in the book. But the highlight is not the descriptions of the parsonage, the Brontes or their lives. The highlight is their doings. So try it and forget it.