The author of Outline of My Lover builds a novel around Branwell Bronte, brother to the famous trio of authoresses, imagining the family life of this famous literary family from the perspective of the least famous and most troubled sibling. Original.
In this mannered, tortuous life of Charlotte Bront‰'s younger brother, Branwell, novelist Martin (Outline of My Lover) offers a tender, tragic portrayal of a doomed artist and homosexual avant la lettre. In Martin's marvelous free and direct telling, Branwell, as the sole son among many daughters (only Charlotte, Emily and Anne survived childhood) is accorded privileges they are not, such as special home schooling by their strict father, curate of provincial Haworth. Branwell also lords over the set of toy soldiers the siblings use in elaborate play wars, creating vast civilizations in poems and plays. The early deaths of their mother and sisters Maria and Elizabeth prove shattering for Branwell, on whose fragile shoulders the great hopes of the house rest. Sent off alone to London to gain admittance to the Royal Academy, he falls continually in his family's esteem, becoming a local drunkard and apprentice to the secretly homosexual freemason society; a last chance at gainful employment, as tutor to a boy in Thorp Green, ends in a scandalous dismissal, and Branwell descends irretrievably into a drug-induced, punishing state of monomania. Though slender, this volume's beautiful declarative sentences are perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family; they bring Branwell Bront‰'s world to light. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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