"This is a story of the loves and limitations that defined the life of an extraordinary woman…like reading a love story designed around people we already know using all the best ingredients: windswept moors, passion unrequited, triangulated affection, love enduring past death. It’s really good."
San Francisco Book Review
"In [Giardina’s] capable hands, Emily and her sisters come to life. I was swept away by the story and only posed one question: why did the book have to come to an end? Haunting and beautifully written."
"It is well known that Charlotte Brontë claimed that her younger sister Emily, author of Wuthering Heights , was the most gifted member of the extraordinary Brontë family. In both her great novel and in her poems, Emily displayed a genius, artistry, and mystical passion with few parallels in English literature. It is thrilling to see how Denise Giardina has captured the intensity of the brief lives and exceptional talent of this unique family in Emily’s Ghost , giving us a new insight into the Brontës’ visionary spirit."
"It is impossible to begin and not finish [Emily’s Ghost ], and just as impossible to lay it aside afterward and say nothing about it."
"A captivating novel that pulls at the heartstrings."
Giardina (Saints and Villains ) offers Brontë fans a solid biographical novel portraying sisters Anne, Charlotte and Emily as different in temperament but in love with the same man, fighting the same illnesses and withdrawing from the same grim realities to write poetry and fiction that express their individual passions. Youngest sister Emily distinguishes herself at age six when, while attending boarding school, she admits to encounters with ghosts. (The punishment doled out by the headmaster does not deter Emily, but it does inspire a well-known scene in Jane Eyre .) Brontë men include brother Branwell, who struggles with addiction; father Patrick, straining to support his family on limited finances; and William Weightman, Patrick's young, flirtatious, social-reforming curate who becomes the key figure as he wins the hearts of the three Brontë girls. Giardina's mid-19th-century England is factually sturdy, while the relationship between Emily and Weightman is nicely nuanced, and the insights and inferences about Emily and Charlotte's relationship are convincingly rendered. You don't have to be a Brontë scholar to appreciate Giardina's novel, but having a little context will greatly increase the payoff. (July)
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Giardina turns from socially conscious historical novels (Fallam's Secret, 2003, etc.) to a fictionalized biography of sui generis poet and novelist Emily Bronte. It begins with a flash-forward in which Emily, anticipating her death from consumption, begins to read her masterpiece Wuthering Heights to her indulgent father Patrick, a venerable Yorkshire clergyman. The story then focuses on Emily's childhood as one of five sisters, two of whom predecease her, and the bond of solidarity formed with siblings Anne and Charlotte, who will also live to write memorable fiction. Headstrong Emily incurs the displeasure of her masters at the Clergy Daughters' School, to which the Bronte girls are sent to prepare for careers as governesses, and upon returning home scandalizes neighbors by roaming the moors unchaperoned, accompanied by her favorite dog and trained hawk. But her horizons expand significantly when handsome young curate William Weightman arrives to assist elderly Reverend Bronte. Weightman's romantic imagination and passionate solidarity with exploited workers agitating for overdue reform attract Emily's sympathetic attention and eventually her devotion. A catastrophic cholera outbreak destroys the incipient lovers' dreams, and Emily retreats into the world of her teeming imagination, creating her passionate antagonist Heathcliff out of Weightman's stoical decency and her own austere independence. Giardina's research tends to occupy undue space and slacken the narrative pace. But the surpassingly strange Bronte family, which also includes surly ne'er-do-well brother Branwell, offers a fascinating spectacle, and the reader's attention is held throughout several labored and redundantsequences. Most interesting, perhaps, is the pointed contrast Giardina presents between Emily's untrammeled, indeed often admirable egoism and Charlotte's emotional meanness and ruthless careerism. Something less than the definitive portrait of a frustratingly elusive great writer, but an agreeable read nonetheless, and a good bet for reading groups.
