The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontes and the Arts

Explores the relationship between the works of the Brontes and the visual, musical, plastic and performing arts.

The Brontë family produced and consumed art across a range of media and genres. Haworth Parsonage and the local region proved a crucible of inspiration not only for Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, but also for their parents. Here were fostered the creative ambitions of four of the nineteenth century’s most provocative novelists, poets and visual artists. In turn, the Brontës now sustain heritage, tourism and creative industries that adapt and disseminate their lives and work, their likenesses and words, across the globe: in books, on a plethora of screens (film, TV, computer and phone), in discarnate audio (radio and podcasts) and embodied on stage. The essays collected here offer the first panoramic and sustained examination of the Brontës’ lives, work and legacies in relation to the visual, musical, plastic and performing arts, tracing their influences and transformations across the lives and cultural afterlives of this extraordinary literary family.