The Essence of the Brontës

First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark's writings on the Brontë sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Brontë's poems. Perceptively but unsentimentally, Spark considers the Brontës' lives and works, including their generally disastrous attempts at teaching, and reflects on her own fascination, as a writer and a reader, with Emily Brontë and with "the immortal Wuthering Heights and its nightmare hero." This edition features a new foreword by Boyd Tonkin, the literary editor at the Independent.