Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan ✔✔✔✔

I purchased this book after looking at it on the shelf at Borders for some time. I've always been fascinated by the Bronte sisters' lives, and Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite classic novels. The book wasn't available at the local library, so I finally decided to buy it - a good decision, because I found it one of the best historical fiction novels I've read.

Before reading it, however, I did read Jane Eyre, and I'm glad I did, because I could see so many details in this book which appeared in Jane Eyre - the awful, awful experiences in a girls' school, the terrible deaths of Charlotte's two older sisters as a result of this same school's discipline, to mention just two. Class differences certainly show themselves too, particularly through the families whose children were educated by Charlotte and Anne.

Although the novel is entitled "Charlotte and Emily", the story is definitely Charlotte's, and I wondered why this novel was also published under the title "The Taste of Sorrow". In following some links, I found a novel devoted to Emily, which I'll try to locate - plus some others - I feel a pull towards stories on literary giants, and there are lots!

I had a hard time deciding what to write here about this novel, because there was so much that spoke to me,so I've left it to goodreads.com to summarise the novel for me:

From an obscure country parsonage came the most extraordinary family of the nineteenth century. The Bronte sisters created a world in which we still live - the intense, passionate world of JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS; and the phenomenon of this strange explosion of genius remains as baffling now as it was to their Victorian contemporaries. In this panoramic novel we see with new insight the members of a uniquely close-knit family whose tight bonds are the instruments of both triumph and tragedy. Emily, the solitary who turns from the world to the greater temptations of the imagination: Anne, gentle and loyal, under whose quietude lies the harshest perception of the stifling life forced upon her: Branwell, the mercurial and self-destructive brother, meant to be king, unable to be a prince: and the brilliant, uncompromising, tormented Charlotte, longing for both love and independence, who establishes the family's name and learns its price.