Putting together a Brontë reading list
Over New Year Soph and I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and have moved on to Agnes Grey. At this point I start to feel a pattern coming on so I'm working up a Brontës reading list. I've read The Big Three, but not for a while.
Like most of my themed reading lists I'm mixing related fiction and non-fiction. It's always a bit of a guess at the best order but I'll change it up if I like.
- Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë
- Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë
- The Brontës, Juliet Barker. Regularly described as ‘the definitive Brontë biography’
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
- Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
- The Brontë Myth, Lucasta Miller
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
- The Complete Poems, Emily Brontë
- The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell. This might result in reading some Gaskell
- The Professor, Charlotte Brontë
- Shirley, Charlotte Brontë
- Villette, Charlotte Brontë
- The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
I've also got The Oxford Companion to the Brontës by Margaret Smith and Christine Alexander as a supplement, rather than to read through. And some other reference-type books I'll look up. If I was starting this from scratch (not partway through the second) I'd have a different order probably.
That's thirteen books, minimum. As I will be reading at least the Brontës themselves out loud this will take some time. We will go to Haworth next time we are nearby, which we regularly are.
We're also on a bit of an Austen kick (are we ever, in truth, not on an Austen kick?) having seen Pride and Prejudice (sort of). Which kind of works.