Which Bronte is your favourite and why?

Found the post. to cartmandua

Me too, least like Shirley, Abcinthia

Enjoyed the post about living near the moors and how it stirs up rugged violence in Wuthering Heights - depressing on one evel but just such raw beauty in another way. Feel Wuthering Heights is a bit like poetry!

I love them all. Jane Eyre or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are probably my favourites.

My least favouite is probably Shirley. Took me a long time to get into it.

Read them all. Love them.

Utterly terrified when I read Jane Eyre at school, all that creeping about and madness - stayed with me, felt marked by the book but love it and more so when I reread it in my 20's and 40's -the romance and the determination of Jane

Villette - first time I read it found it so bland, second time adored it, the sadness of the woman and her deep longing are so poignant. Really is worth an effort

Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I love. Difficulty of relationships so believable.

Want to go to Haworth, when my kids are grown up, maybe my DH will take me.

mimble - Lucy Snowe is really difficult. Snobby, small minded, v patronising. I have yet to come to the interesting bit where she meets a young dr. (apparently) and that gives her a new world view. Please make it soon!

I love Agnes Grey, I empathise with the heroine as I once was a teacher and I suspect that's a big part of the attraction. I loathed Shirley, "Tenant" was ok, adored Jane Eyre and W.H of course, I forgot about Villette. Please do read Agnes though 'tis wonderful..

loveday, I've got all the way through Villette more than once, cross my heart and hope to die and think it's a wonderful book, in fact it would be one of my desert island books, to be honest.

could not have put it better cartimandua!

The time travelling nurse is only the beginning.. for wouldn't you know it she's engaged to a stolid doctor type who's decent but unromantic in 1945, and carrying on a passionate affair with Jamie Fraser, a 17th century etc etc etc....

Well, as you can imagine it all gets a bit complicated. But perhaps this is not the thread for that!

I did, several times in my youth. Prefer 'The Professor' though.

has anyone actually managed to fight all the way through "Vilette"? I am suspect this is a book where no-one has actually managed to finish it. Ever. But we are too polite to say so.

Still, due largely to Jane Eyre, it has to be Charlotte.

I was brought up in Haworth and spent a lot of my childhood wandering about the same landscapes as they did. Top Withens has indeed changed a lot: I remember when it had a roof. I was last up there eight or nine years ago; the picnic tables aren't too obtrusive but you need to defend your lunch from over-friendly local sheep! Though there were no signposts in Japanese then, the Bronte industry was alive and flourishing sixty years ago.

Would have loved to have met Emily. We know so little about her, and a lot of what we think we know was relayed through Charlotte, and is therefore probably not 100% trustworthy or objective. One thing which is utterly plain though is her sense of place - of the power of those moorland landscapes to move one's spirit. I am not a fanciful person - card-carrying Yorkshirewoman here - but Wuthering Heights expresses things about that feeling of the land in your bones and blood that it is almost pagan. I'm probably not explaining it very well.

For anyone who is interested in the Brontes generally, I can't recommend Juliet Barker's book highly enough.

All of the above is true, except I also have turrets and staff to kiss the children. They have germs, you know......
I too love Russell Brand - He, like Anne, is a lot cleverer than people give him credit for.
There's a film??? I wonder how they manage the crucial 'baddie crushed by herd of maurauding sheep' scene? I am off to scour amazon for a copy......

My favourite is the tenant of wildfell hall so Anne is my favourite bronte

ah kirriem, you have reassured me I imagined you in a massive library of books like a foxy sort of prof with the children being brought in at night so you can absent mindedly kiss the top of their heads as staff take them away so you can Think and write some more books etc.

I'm intrigued about yr low brow guilty pleasure! I don't feel quite so sordid but I just love Russell Brand, his first book made me laugh out loud and this one too, I used to listen to his podcasts, no one really uses language like he does. I don't enjoy the idea of him carnally, I ain't a girl for a Dandy, he's just funny.

Have you seen the EMily Blunt film of OUtlander? Is it acceptable or unacceptable?

oh dear, thread highjack!

aww thanks Noelle! At this stage I should possibly come out and say my other favorite romantic novel is the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. Its about the starcrossed romance between a time travelling WW2 nurse and Jamie Fraser, a 17th century Jacobite soldier. My Booky Wook 2 is War and Peace compared to that. But, then, Jamie can handle a woman like he handles his horses... masterful yet gentle, and with a squeeze of his muscular thigh....
sigh.

Sorry, that last illiterate post was typed while three year old chicken pox sufferer helped me type.

I'd like a reading list in order of what Brontes I should read given that in my squalid ignorance and neglect I've only read JE and WH.

So tell me in what order I should read the other novels please in order.
Thanks

Just realised "The Governess" is Agnes Grey.

One of my favourite books of all time is Jane Eyre and have read it many times. However I did really enjoy Tennant of Wildfire Hall and I can't remember if I have read Agnes Grey. I thought i had read one called The Governess by either Anne or Charlotte but can't find it listed anywhere.

I have never managed to get past the first few pages of Wuthering Heights.

mimbleandlittlemy - fabulous trivia

And kirriemummy what a fantastic tribute to a book! Penguin should stick that on it's latest issue! You've made me want to read WH again, and obviously I'm going to have to go and pay tribute to Ann as well. Have you put that review in Mumsnet book reviews?

...slumps in chair thinking to herself 'why am I reading Russel Brand my bookywook 2 instead of something better? Because it makes me laugh but still...... I could be growing my brain.....'

I read the letters of the brontes, and what came across to me was that Emily seemed to be an extremely difficult person to get along with - like a kind of hyper intellegent Kevin the Teenager who seemed to be intent on dying to prove some sort of point. Anne seemed to be a little pushed under the carpet by the other two, destined for a life of quiet domesicity, and Charlotte seemed to be a bit pushy (who can blame her) but the most connected to the rest of the world. From that I think that my favorite sister is Anne because she blindsided them, completely overturned everyone's expectations of her, and wrote about something really important 100 years before anyone else noticed that there might be something wrong with men who hit women. Go Anne, I say.

But my favorite book is Wuthering Heights, because its so effortlessly brilliant - it twists, turns, casually invents entire genres and literary techniques, the language and turn of phrase are fantastic. I would argue that it invents the idea of teenagers. I love it because it is melodramatic and soapy - exactly what a teenager would write, but it is executed better than most adult men could hope to achieve, and she managed it when she was 19. Not only did she manage it, she pulled it off with such a flourish that you would never dream of anyone but a supremely confident and experienced writer attempting to write it. My final point would be, like melodramas and soaps at their best, it's fun to read - she's not writing for an intellectual exercise - she wants the reader to enjoy it, and i love that. It is an awesome book. It also has my favorite ever quote:
"'why can't you always be a good girl, Cathy?'
'why can't you always be a good man, Daddy?'"

excellent subject, btw!

Charlotte and Anne.

I wrote a dissertation for my English Lit degree on Anne Bronte's two novels (anyone else read Anne's other novel: Agnes Grey?) I think I called it "The Quiet Feminist" or some other such wanky title. But she really was far more radical in her feminist standpoint than the other two.