The Brontë sisters' story has been told again and again. But can a new BBC docu-drama add anything to the enduring saga? Lucasta Miller thinks not
In 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell published her classic Life of Charlotte Brontë. Since then, the Brontë sisters' story has been told numerous times, with varying degrees of success, in a dizzying variety of genres. In Jane Eyre and Rochester, Cathy and Heathcliff, Charlotte and Emily created characters who have imprinted themselves indelibly on popular culture. But the authors, likewise, have become woven into the collective consciousness - immortalised not only in straight biographies, but in novels, plays, and films, as well as on the souvenir tea-towels in which the shopkeepers of Haworth, the home of the Brontës, still do a brisk trade.
BBC1's decision to retell the story once more, in a new two-part drama-documentary, prompts the question, do we really need it? In one sense, at least, the answer must be yes. The combination of tragedy and creativity at the heart of the Brontës' history has a truly mythic staying power, which is still crying out, generations on, to be revisited. Whether you see it as windswept romance or feminist fable, there is something irreducibly moving about the idea of these three sisters, scarred by the early deaths of their mother and older siblings, growing up in provincial obscurity, and producing some of the most passionate novels in the language before succumbing one by one to consumption.
More of a problem for would-be tellers of the Brontë story is the fact that it has always been, in Elizabeth Gaskell's words, a "hornet's nest", with biographical spin-doctors pursuing their own agendas and projecting their own fantasies on to their subjects. In fact, so many legends and inaccuracies eventually grew up around them that in recent times the Brontës have become the focus for revisionism, not least by their biographer, Juliet Barker, who acted as consultant on this programme.
In Search of the Brontës completely silences this background of competing interpretations. As a result, its version of the Bronte story is something of an intellectual cop-out. Rather than acknowledging the difficulties involved in the "search" for the definitive life, it tells its story straight, ignoring the fact that the truth is often rather more complicated.
Part of the trouble stems from the fact that it can't quite decide whether it's a drama or a documentary, since the action is interspersed with passages of narrative commentary provided by the comfortable, complacently authoritative voiceover of Patricia Routledge. Clips from previous TV adaptations are used to illustrate the novels. When the Brontës speak, the script makes admirable use of some of their own words, adapted from letters or diary fragments, or from their imaginative writings.
At other times, such as when the sisters' father, Patrick, lambasts them for living too much in a fantasy world, what we get is wholly invented. The trouble with the format is that it elides fact with speculation, giving the viewer no steer on what is documented history and what isn't.
After her sisters' deaths, for example, Charlotte (Victoria Hamilton) is shown feeding the manuscript of Emily's second novel into the fire. What this sequel to Wuthering Heights actually was is one of the great mysteries of literary history. Its disappearance has made the elusive author all the more of an enigma for posterity. But the idea that her sister was responsible for its destruction actually remains pure biographical guesswork, even though it is presented here as part of the undisputed record.
This sort of thing might not matter if it wasn't for the fact that the Brontës have so often in the past been the victims of sloppy fictionalisation. Their first biographer, Gaskell, was a novelist, who confessed she had real difficulty in making herself stick to the facts. But it wasn't until the 1920s and 1930s that the vogue for dramatising the Brontë story really took off, in the shape of wildly inaccurate, sentimental plays with names such as The Tragic Race or Empurpled Moors.
Most preposterous was Devotion, the Hollywood film of the 1940s starring Olivia de Havilland. Worried that the story contained insufficient romantic interest, Warner Brothers turned the industrial township of Haworth into a nostalgic England of half- timbered cottages, and invented a completely spurious love triangle by which Emily was made to die of unrequited passion for Charlotte's fiancé, Arthur Nicholls (she was also subject to seeing visions of misty men on large black horses).
Compared with this, the BBC's offering is a model of reasoned restraint, but that isn't to say it doesn't have its own agenda. It takes its cue from Juliet Barker, whose biography aimed to rescue the reputations of the Brontë men, who had had a raw deal, particularly from Gaskell.
Patrick, the father, is thus put centre stage, and it is through his imagined recollections that we get access to much of the story. Though Gaskell presented him as a neglectful parent given to sawing up the furniture in a rage, here we see him devotedly nurturing the talents of his children. To make this extraordinary self-made man - who pulled himself out of an Irish peasant background to become a Church of England cleric - the sympathetic focus is innovative. But how much more interesting it would have been, for viewers new to the Brontës, to be made aware of the process by which the truth about Patrick had been disentangled from the misinformation.
A documentary, without the bonnets and corsets, could have allowed the biographers to put their own case direct and could have given voice to the fact that the Brontës have always inspired conflicting viewpoints. One suspects the BBC decided to present the story through actors in costumes not as a positive choice, but as an unwitting knee-jerk response to the long tradition of biographical fictionalisation associated with the Brontës.
But along with this there's also a slightly inhibited feeling, a fear of full investment in the drama, hence the objective-sounding voiceover. An awareness that the Brontës have inspired melodramatic over-statement in the past seems to hang over it, reducing the impact of some of the most genuinely moving moments from Gaskell's Life. Charlotte, thus, is not allowed to search the wintry moors for a last sprig of heather with which to cheer the dying Emily, only to find her unable to recognise the beloved flower. Instead, Emily comes to a perfunctory end in her father's arms (for which there is no biographical evidence). The telling details are edited from Anne's death, too, which was actually recorded in intimate, eyewitness detail by a family friend.
Pulled in two directions - it wants to be a drama, yet aspires to sober historical accuracy - this film ends up an uneasy compromise. As a result, it doesn't have enough artistic confidence to excuse the minor errors of fact that have managed to slip through (Charlotte did not meet Mrs Gaskell at a London dinner party, but in the Lake District, and her husband was never referred to as Mr Bell Nicholls).
More worryingly, its preference for narrative over analysis sells the Brontës short. A century ago, Henry James complained that the popularisation of their life story had become a "beguiled infatuation" which got in the way of true appreciation of their works. If this programme disappoints, it is chiefly because it doesn't get across the abrasive, questioning and sophisticated depth of its subjects' literary imaginations.
In Search of the Brontës, Sunday, August 3rd and 10th, BBC1. The Brontë Myth, by Lucasta Miller, is published by Jonathan Cape