Book Report: Mad Love (Books #4 and #5)

By happy coincidence I read Douglas A. Martin’s Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea the same week. Wide Sargasso Sea, published for the first time in 1966, is a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre and creates a life in the West Indies for Mr. Rochester’s first wife, exploring the early years of her life as well as their meeting and marriage. Branwell is a recently published fictionalized portrait of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte’s only brother.

The image of the Bronte family is an alluring one, from their bleak and lonely existence punctuated by the early deaths of their siblings and mother to their escape into brilliantly imagined worlds of their own creation. The two novels share much in common beyond their obvious relationship to the Bronte oeuvre. Each explores their character’s slow descent into madness, a madness brought on by both societal expectations and sexual restraints. When read in tandem, reality and fiction become intertwined. In Branwell, Charlotte becomes the cruel and unforgiving Mr. Rochester of Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea while Emily Bronte is Jane Eyre, the only sister who selflessly stands guardian angel to her brother as he descends into a private hell. Emotionally rich and sublimely lyrical, Martin’s haunting novel adds another dimension to the Bronte legacy and legend and perhaps gives Branwell Bronte the story he was never able to tell.

Related: The 75 Book Challenge