Knocking a Little Stuffing Out of Bronte Lore : Biographer delves into Victorian records, articles to challenge long-held views of literary sisters. : THE BRONTES, <i> By Juliet Barker (A Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s Press: $35; 1003 pp.)</i>

No coward soul is Juliet Barker to have taken on this subject--and what a splendid new biography is the result! This landmark study of the Brontes--the culmination of 11 years’ work and the 37-year-old author’s self-confessed obsession--not only breaks new ground in its depiction of the life and times of the legendary family, but reads with all the pulse and throb of a novel.

I admit to being dubious when “The Brontes” first arrived: It’s a heavy, formidable-looking tome with a dark, brooding, cover. (People who saw me reading it during the summer would crack, “Finishing your homework?” or something to that effect.) Leafing through its 1,000-odd pages, and looking at the plethora of outstanding Bronteana that already lined my shelves--works by Margot Peters, Rebecca Fraser, Winifred Gerin, Edward Chitham--I wondered, as you might, exactly how anything new could possibly be written about the authors of “Jane Eyre” (Charlotte), “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (Anne), and what contemporary critics called “that strange thing,” “Wuthering Heights” (Emily).

Not long into the book, however, my doubts were quelled. Barker succeeds on several levels. First, by delving into an astonishing number of primary sources--parish registers, examination books, local newspapers, account books--she challenges many of the long-accepted “truths” of the Bronte myth that sprang up so soon after Charlotte’s death.

Second, her way of granting the story an exceptionally wide canvas increases our sense of understanding not only the Brontes’ origins, but of the posthumous cult. She begins with the background of the ambitious Patrick Bronte (ne Brunty, in Ireland) and ends long after the loquacious Elizabeth Gaskell, the first Victorian biographer, made her way to the family homestead, the parsonage of Haworth.

Barker’s characterization of Haworth--the Yorkshire mecca for Bronte fanatics since the mid-19th Century--is the first element of the cult that Barker addresses. Herself a native of Yorkshire, Barker writes with the authority of one who also spent six years as curator of the Bronte Parsonage Museum:

“Two years spent reading contemporary papers in local archives may have addled my brain but it has also provided an unexpectedly large haul of information which should, once and for all, scotch the myth that Haworth was a remote and obscure village where nothing ever happened. It was a township, a small, industrial town in the heart of a much larger chapelry, where politics and religion were hotly disputed and culture thrived.”

Barker’s aim, here and in every aspect of the story, is to place Haworth in the context of the times, examining its access to newspapers and books, its health records, its water supply, and its mortality rates--all of which seem to question whether the Brontes’ lives, and the bereavements they suffered, were really more grave than those of other citizens; whether Haworth itself assumed the force of a romantic character in the life of the sisters and their story.

Next comes Barker’s scrutiny of the father, Patrick Bronte:

“Those who knew Patrick well, including his friends and his servants, did not recognize him in Mrs. Gaskell’s portrait: The words they used to describe him were uniformly ‘kind,’ ‘affable,’ ‘considerate’ and ‘genial.’ Like her picture of barbaric Haworth, Mrs. Gaskell’s portrayal of Patrick as a half-mad recluse who wanted nothing to do with his children was intended to explain away those characteristics of his daughters’ writings which the Victorians found unacceptable.”

This view of Patrick will, no doubt, incense many Bronte addicts--those who subscribe to the genius-sprung-full-blown school of scholarship, and others of the girls-as-victims-to-patriarchal-authority camp. I found Barker’s view compelling, for I’ve often wondered how a father who seemed able to pinpoint the talents of each child and to nurture those talents could have been the harsh, remote figure of legend; and why, if he was indeed so harsh, he seemed, throughout his daughters’ lives, to have been so much the ballast of the family. Their concern for him--his health, his well-being--never wavered.

Whether he was, in fact, the “isolator” of legend, or, rather, a leader of the community who exposed his daughters to a world of ideas far beyond the parsonage walls is one of the more provocative issues in this book. Barker would take the second view--Patrick as a political activist who had inculcated his daughters with a passion for politics and “whose activities were constantly recorded and whose letters were regularly published . . . a tireless campaigner and reformer, a man of liberal beliefs rather than the rampant Tory he is so often labeled.”

Given these quite radically different views of the mainstays of the cult, the next question, of course, is how the daughters fare. Anne emerges as a more substantial figure than the pallid follower of her older sisters’ brilliance--far more headstrong and daring than the “little Anne” of old; Emily as so completely absorbed and influenced by her imaginary world of childhood Gondal stories that she was never able to leave them (rough-hewn Gondal, Walter Scott and German romantic literature being among the influences of “Wuthering Heights”).

But it is the portrait of Charlotte that, in its own quiet way, startles. This is not the Pitiful Pearl or the mousy long-suffering little author painted by others. She may be less “perfect” in Barker’s portrait, but she is undeniably more interesting and complete, capable of ruthlessness, fury, sarcasm, hypochondria, and, at one point, “malicious glee.” (Is it not telling that the world of her childhood stories was called “Angria,” and that the name Jane Eyre bears such a close relationship to ire ? )

She is also the bossy, controlling older sister, not above toning down her sister Emily’s work, apologizing for its “uncivilized” tone or, indeed, as Barker suggests, possibly destroying a manuscript for the latter’s second novel and thus preventing another spate of the savage reviews that had greeted the publication of “Wuthering Heights.”

At once fascinated by and afraid of what lies beyond the Parsonage walls, Charlotte is clearly the most ambitious of the siblings, the one who thrashes against the constraints of her hometown and whose disappointment with her brother Branwell’s failure to live up to the family’s expectations adds a curious bitterness to her sadness at his early death.

She is also the sibling most entranced, from an early age, by the glamour of society and chagrined by her own lack of physical beauty. That she was a genius, and long sustained by a vivid inner world, seemed not ever to be a complete satisfaction to her. Indeed, her publisher George Smith made this telling, not to say pathetic, observation:

“There was but little feminine charm about her; and of this fact she herself was uneasily and perpetually conscious. It may seem strange that the possession of genius did not lift her above the weakness of an excessive anxiety about her personal appearance. But I believe that she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful.”

Charlotte died at 39, shortly after marrying the local curate Arthur Bell Nichols. “Real life” and real happiness seemed perpetually beyond her grasp. There was her thwarted, passionate love for her professor, Constatin Heger, who not only taught her to discipline her thinking and writing, but became, in the process, the model for Mr. Rochester (all wonderfully portrayed by Barker); her trips to London to meet the intelligentsia--William Makepeace Thackeray, George Lewes--but always rather as a freakish outsider, improperly dressed, awkward and ambivalent about the very people she had professed longing to meet.

Anyone fascinated by the Brontes cannot fail to read this book: It is indispensable to understanding them, their world and their uniqueness within 19th-Century English literature. The depth of Juliet Barker’s research, and the searching questions she poses, more than compensate for the book’s few flaws (Emily Bronte, in particular, seems to have been given the short shrift, as does the actual process of Charlotte’s writing “Jane Eyre.”

Still it makes me uncomfortable to quibble, when Barker has made such a massive contribution to Bronte scholarship (her analyses and understanding of the juvenilia alone are worth the price of the book). In doing so she also illustrates much about the biographer’s craft: how new understanding can be created by going back to primary sources and questioning the mainstays of legend.

I came to the end of “The Brontes” as one might the end of an exceptionally rich and well-balanced meal. The only questions that remained, in my mind at least, were these: What created Juliet Barker’s own obsession? And what will be her next subject?