Art work by Patrick Branwell Brontë / Photograph from Getty

It is one of the most charming stories in English literary history. In July, 1848, the publisher George Smith found waiting for him in his London office two “rather quaintly dressed little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking.” The smaller and plainer of them, wearing glasses, came up to him with a letter in her hand. It was addressed to Currer Bell, the somewhat notorious male novelist best known as the author of “Jane Eyre.” “Where did you get this from?” Smith asked her. “From the post office,” Charlotte Brontë replied. “It was addressed to me.” So it was that the secret of the Brontë sisters was revealed. Mr. Smith’s most famous author was a woman—and a provincial woman at that. Charlotte was undistinguished, with a head that struck Mr. Smith as “too large for her body”; she might just as well have been a missionary, or even a cook. Her younger sister Anne had a manner “curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal.” Emily, the middle sister, had remained at home in Yorkshire, where she kept house and fed the dogs.

Mr. Smith could hardly have guessed that he was present at the birth of a literary legend as powerful as that of Marlowe’s murder or Chatterton’s suicide. The received story of the Brontës was not so sanguinary, but it was equally sensational. The world soon knew that there had been three women of genius, untutored and unloved, immured within a house as bleak as any prison or asylum, insulted by a drunken and manic brother, oppressed by a stern and occasionally violent father, finding their relief only in wonderful little treks across the Yorkshire moors.

Mrs. Gaskell, possibly the most credulous and most sentimental biographer of the nineteenth century, began the process. She was already a famous novelist, but she reserved her finest fictional touches for her life of Charlotte Brontë. Her sublimely inaccurate portrait was followed by works of various other biographers, who managed to fill their books with material more extravagant than anything to be found in a Brontë novel. One of them had the sisters eating “gypsy fashion” on the moors, while another tried to prove that all their writings were based upon Irish originals.

There was a reaction against these excesses when certain unfortunately prosaic facts were introduced by Francis Leyland, in his 1886 biography. Yet the general tendency has continued to be toward a kind of morbid romanticism, and it must be said that Juliet Barker’s comprehensive and sensible new work, “The Brontës” (St. Martin’s; $35), is the first that wholly takes a stand against the legend. The girls were neither mad nor bad nor particularly dangerous to know. Their father, Patrick, was a kind and genial parent; their brother, Branwell, was a talented and resourceful writer; Aunt Elizabeth Branwell was not the ferocious and dogmatic Methodist of myth but a rather flighty old party of advanced views. All this will come as a severe disappointment to the more excitable Brontë admirers, but, in exchange for their illusions, Juliet Barker offers them a beguiling and convincing account of the family upon the moors.

Patrick Brontë was an Irishman of straitened means who by skill and hard work made his way to Cambridge University. He became a devout Evangelical, then a minister who managed to give even “muscular Christianity” a good name. In 1812, while serving at a church in Hartshead, near Dewsbury, Yorkshire, he met Maria Branwell, his future wife. She was bright, alert, and energetic, with her own propensity for religious fervor. They conversed upon “the heavenly Father” and “eternal felicity,” but there were one or two pleasantly gothic touches to redeem an otherwise sober courtship: he proposed to her in a ruined abbey, and her bridal veil was lost in a shipwreck.

So the Brontë children emerged from a pious household where the machinations of the local religious societies provided the only hint of drama. Patrick fulfilled his pastoral duties conscientiously and, on one notable occasion, preached to the Bradford Female Auxiliary Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews. He wrote poems and stories that ended happily, as all evangelical stories should, yet were strangely prescient of his daughters’ later productions. Maria wrote, too, and once composed an essay on the virtues of poverty. It is all sufficiently starched and restrained, if not quite as grim as the readers of “Wuthering Heights” might wish.

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Seven years after his marriage, Patrick Brontë announced that “Providence has called me to labour in His vineyard at Haworth.” Haworth was described by a clergyman as almost a “heathen village,” whose inhabitants treated people “like wild beasts,” and this is the impression that Brontë biographers have tried to maintain. The fact is, however, that Haworth was not a backwater on the edge of desolation but a prosperous industrial town. The adjacent moors have also been a source of romance, of course—at least for those who know little about them. Mrs. Gaskell considered them to be an ominous brown but, Barker points out, she had merely visited them at the wrong time of the year. And the Brontë parsonage itself is not quite the horrid pile she depicted but a late-eighteenth-century house of some elegance and charm. The view of the moors from its windows was splendid, and not one to incite any particularly grotesque associations. Those came from closer quarters.

A year and a half after the move to Haworth, Maria Brontë died, crying out continuously, “Oh God my poor children—oh God my poor children!” Four years later, the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, died of consumption, contracted at a boarding school for the daughters of clergymen. These were indeed formative experiences in the lives of the remaining siblings, but the Brontë sisters did not automatically become the silent wraiths of Mrs. Gaskell’s imagination. On the contrary, Barker shows that their childhood was essentially a happy one, and that the accounts of suffering were largely promulgated as a way of excusing those passionate elements of the Brontës’ fiction “which the Victorians found unacceptable.” In truth, the remaining Brontë children were remarkable only in the literary predilections that they shared, and Barker provides a wonderful portrait of four highly intelligent people who preferred one another’s company to anyone else’s and, as a result, stimulated one another’s already overheated imaginations. They contracted “scribblemania,” and poured out an endless stream of prose and verse written in very small letters on tiny scraps of paper. Charlotte and Branwell collaborated on the creation of a fictional world known as Angria—and for a time, it seems, Branwell was the better writer. Emily and Anne, who had become “like twins, inseparable companions,” worked together on events in a land named Gondal. The four of them were instinctive novelists, mainly because they saw no distinction between invention and reality; it is hard to overemphasize how much those unreal worlds meant to them, since they seem to have dreamed, lived, and imagined very little else. It should come as no surprise, then, that their “mature” fiction springs directly from their childhood writing. The scenes and passions of “Wuthering Heights” come from Gondal, and Charlotte purloined the opening chapters of “The Professor” from one of Branwell’s pieces.