She uses the vocabulary of popular journalism: “eye-watering” “phenomenal” “achingly fashionable”. She didn’t even make 30.” But Anne’s sad ending is balanced by her own happy one. By the end, she’s marrying a good man and feeling because “there’s nothing that can soften this. As she begins, Ellis is single, going on 40, prone to seizures and anxious about all three conditions. In Take Courage, she mixes her own story in with Anne’s. In her previous book, How to Be a Heroine, she mashed up literary criticism with an essay on self-help. Ellis is a practitioner of a new genre – chick-lit-crit. In this sprightly book, Samantha Ellis sets out to give Anne her due. As her champion, she identifies Charlotte as her opponent

Its shocking subject matter was inconsistent, said Charlotte, with Anne’s “naturally sensitive, reserved and dejected nature”.Įllis is combative on Anne’s behalf. After Anne’s death, Charlotte Brontë refused to sanction a third edition of Wildfell Hall. The latter lets go, “roaring like a wild beast”, and collapses on to an ottoman from which he taunts and threatens his miserable wife, eventually staggering to his feet to knock her down.Īnne Brontë’s stature as a novelist would probably have been more readily recognised had she been born into another family, not only because she had two of English fiction’s most enduringly popular authors as in-house competitors, but because one of them did her utmost – out of a well-founded fear of public opprobrium – to downplay Anne’s achievement. Getting hold of a candle, he burns Hattersley’s hands with it. He struggles, pale with anger, to resist Hattersley’s proclaimed intent to make him drunk again. Mr Hattersley, his face purple, his laughter manic, has Lord Lowborough by the arm and is trying to drag him out of the drawing room. H ere’s a scene from Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Take Courage by Samantha Ellis