Review: Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, Rachel Cantor (2023)

You might be surprised that my review of Rachel Cantor’s 2023 novel Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, a retelling of the Bronte siblings’ lives, isn’t part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series. After all, those are the blog posts in which I dissect works of fiction written in the twenty-first century but set in the nineteenth. However, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, while it is a book about the Brontes, isn’t set in the nineteenth century at all. 

Instead, the sisters (originally five in number, but, for much of the novel, three) and their brother, whose names are constantly shifting, live not in Victorian Haworth, but in a city apartment building in a near-contemporary era. They navigate corporate jobs, as well as nannying. They interact with their doorman and, early in the book, with child protective services. 

Confused? You may well be for much of the novel. Every chapter takes a different form—e.g., as a script, a letter, a diary paper. The point of view shifts from sibling to sibling and, at each break in the narrative, we are asked to take a plunge into a different reality. Reader, I loved it.

As someone who immersed herself in the lives and works of the Brontes, as I researched and wrote my 2020 novel, Bronte’s Mistress, rarely have I felt so much that a book was written for me. There’s no spoon-feeding of readers here. This is definitely not the book to pick up if you’re learning about the lives of literature’s most famous family for the first time. But if, like me, you’re a Bronte fanatic, who knows the timeline of the siblings lives like the back of your hand, and who’s very familiar with their works and juvenilia, you’re in for a treat. 

What Cantor does so well is capture the closeness within the family and the imaginative childhood play that the Brontes continued well into adulthood. This is a novel about siblings who are obsessed with words and who use them to construct a sort of folie a quatre. And it’s about the conflict that occurs when those who have grown up in a separate world interact with the “real” world. 

I doubt that Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, despite the Brontes’ continued popularity, will reach a wide readership. But I hope that it reaches and delights the right readership.

Have you read the novel? I’d love to hear what you think! Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly emails about the Brontes, my writing and more? Sign up to my email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, Syrie James (2009)

With my own Bronte-inspired novel, Bronte’s Mistress, coming out in just (!) three months (August 2020) from Atria Books, I was so excited to read the next novel in my Neo-Victorian Voices series—Syrie James’s The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte (2009).

The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, Syrie James (2009)

James’s novel may be titled a diary, but it reads more like a memoir—a novelisation of Charlotte Bronte’s life as she herself might have written it. Charlotte’s relationship with her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, is at the heart of the novel’s dramatic arc, but all the most compelling stories that make up the Bronte myth are here—from the early losses of two sisters and a mother that marred the Bronte siblings’ childhoods, to Charlotte’s time in Brussels, which formed the inspiration for much of her published work.

James does a wonderful job of interweaving fact and conjecture, and in bringing the Bronte household in Haworth to life. She always makes us aware of the limited space within the parsonage and the resulting difficulties of keeping anything secret between the adult siblings.

Reverend Bronte, the Brontes’ father, doesn’t come out of the story well. Otherwise, most characters are painted in accordance with Elizabeth Gaskell’s sensational Bronte biography, which makes a lot of sense, given her relationship was primarily with Charlotte. Emily loves the moors and is most comfortable with her dog, eschewing all other company. Anne is shy and religious. Branwell is a raving drunk, despite the promise of his youth.

It’s Charlotte herself whom, appropriately, we come to understand on a deeper level. I loved how James created a character with the perfect blend of outward awkwardness and internal passion. The book’s central romance raised a fascinating question: how could any real love even hope to compete with Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester in Charlotte’s eyes?

I think the novel would serve as a wonderful introduction to the lives of the Brontes, since the story cleaves so closely to the historical record. For those well versed in the Brontes’ works, the joy of reading the book comes in playing “spotting the sources” for the ideas, and sometimes passages, inspired by the sisters’ famous novels—and, of course, in getting access to Charlotte’s secrets as never before.

Which novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next in my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Plus, big news, if you’re signed up to my email newsletter already, or if you sign up this month (May 2020) using the link below, you’ll be in with a shot of winning one of two advance reader copies of Bronte’s Mistress, prior to its publication! My novel gives voice to Lydia Robinson, the older, married woman, who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, and offers a new perspective on English literature’s most famous family. Sign up below!

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Review: The Mother of the Brontës: When Maria Met Patrick, Sharon Wright (2019)

Three sisters living at the edge of a Yorkshire moor, with their widowed father and troubled brother—this is the legend we’re used to hearing about the Brontës. But in her wonderful recent biography, The Mother of the Brontës: When Maria Met Patrick, Sharon Wright shines a light on that other member of the family—the mother, who gave Branwell Brontë (the Brontë sibling most central to my forthcoming novel) his name.

Maria Branwell, who was, from 1812 until her early death in 1821, Mrs Brontë, has always been a shadowy figure. Anne Brontë, the youngest of the famous siblings, had no memory of her. Charlotte, Branwell, and Emily were, respectively, five, four, and three at her death. But here she comes to life, as does her sprawling, successful family, enterprising business people from bustling Cornish Penzance.

In the early chapters of her biography, Wright charts the fortunes of the Branwell family (who shared with Patrick Brontë an unfortunate habit of frequently changing the spelling of their last name). Later, our focus is more securely on Maria—on her move from Cornwall to Yorkshire, her whirlwind romance with the Reverend Brontë, and her life as a young wife, giving birth to six children within seven years.

I rate my knowledge of the Brontës pretty highly (I did a LOT of research into the family, especially Branwell and Anne, for my novel, Brontë’s Mistress), but the biography still taught me lots I didn’t know. I’d never, for instance, spent time with Maria’s surviving letters (published here in full in the appendix), or realised that she had writing aspirations of her own, even as she went through multiple pregnancies in quick succession.

More than anything the book left me with an impression of how connected the Brontës were—to a large family of Cornish relatives, and to middle class society in Thornton, where the young couple set up their first family home. Our prevailing view of the Brontës is often one centred on isolation. The Brontë parsonage, sited as it is at the edge of Haworth, gives us the impression of the family as having existed on the outskirts of the world.

There’s a romance to isolation that many of us might have believed in (at least until the last few weeks). The Brontës’ physical distance from the (publishing) world and their motherlessness are both factors that have contributed to the establishment of the Brontë myth. But Maria existed, and her influence on her children—on their friendships, reading taste, and personalities—seems to have extended long after her death.

If you, like me, love the Brontës, I’d highly recommend checking out Sharon Wright’s book. And if you’re a reader of fiction, as well as non-fiction, you might want to read more about my novel, Brontë’s Mistress, here.