• Series: Caínes and Abeles: the Semprún

As in the portrait that illustrates the cover of Infernales. Brotherhood Brontë (Tautrus), the biography of Argentine writer Laura Ramos dedicated the four writers, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell, in the popular imaginary of the Brontë, Branwell, the only brother, has been erased . In the case of the painting, painted by him, it was he who covered himself with an ocher column, so his portrait is blurred on the cover of the book. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre ; Emily is the author of Wuthering Heights ; Anne wrote a protofeminist novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall ; and Branwell, in whom the father placed all hopes and investments, is the author of a huge number of poems that were published in life in different newspapers.

Laura Ramos decided that she would write a biography about the Brontës on her second visit to Haworth, where she spent three weeks. Account in a final note in the book: «I decided, with shoes full of mud and snow, possessed, to avoid the contemporary readings and feminist criticism that so interested my mother to oppose my only interlocutor, the first biographer, the friend from Charlotte, the sentimentalist , Mrs. Gaskell. If the studies of the twentieth century were dedicated to investigate the relationship between the self and the work, between the biographical and the personal self , I would open a forbidden package: sentimentality . I would appropriate all the research done so far, I would make the British, Irish and Belgian Brontë route, but it would also water from the discredited sources: gossip, seers, pharmacists, drunkards, ghosts, the sister-in-law of the guard ».

Charlotte fabricated a sweetened image of her sisters and vampirized her brother, addicted to opium, alcoholic and indebted

The mission that Ramos imposed, which has been in Spain these days in response to the press, was to gather all those data discovered in the twentieth century that “ put into question the general idea that the Brontë were three virgins of the moor that They didn't know the world and they were ignorant girls. I searched through all the research and criticism that was done to compile and put together a more realistic story than the one written by the Brontë myth, which Charlotte herself began to write when her sisters died. She decided to tell that story because her family needed it: they were the three authors, because they published under the pseudonym male, more vilified of England . Charlotte needed to restore the good name after the death of Emily and Anne. Reissue his sisters' novels, omit, censure one of Anne's novels, The Tenant , because it is a protofeminist novel, and edit, cut and change Emily's poems.

The Brontë family seems marked by the sign of misfortune, and that fattens the myth. The mother died soon. The father was a pastor and, after the death of his wife, sent the daughters to a home "for daughters of poor clerics." The two elders, Maria and Elizabeth, became ill and died of tuberculosis - the family disease - less than two months apart and 10 and 11 years old. The rest of the brothers created a literary brotherhood, Juvenilia , with two infernal worlds, Angria , of Charlotte and Branwell, and Gondal , of Emily and Anne. They spent hours and hours and suffered for their characters and their true destiny. The Brontë lived literature with an incomparable intensity.

Infernales is a biography about that brotherhood and the weight of the story falls on one or the other as required by events : at the beginning, the role is collective, until the brotherhood is broken with the departure of the girls at boarding school. At times, the book focuses on the dialectic between Charlotte and Branwell , accomplices and competitors. The protagonism of each one is also a reflection of the personality: thus, Emily and Anne occupy a discreet background . The exits of the rectory are important and mark the sisters, the boarding school, but also the stay in Belgium and the knowledge of French will be essential for Emily and Charlotte. As for her differences as writers, Ramos explains: "Emily talks about creation, Charlotte finds a voice of an ugly woman so powerful that it goes through the centuries, Anne is like a kind of witness writer and Branwell was Cain and ended up being Abel" .

The biography is constructed with that mixture of authorized sources and rumors that are taken with caution. There are diverse materials - letters, diaries, poems, other biographies - that tell the facts. Ramos has been contaminated by the Brontë literature: that explains the use of some novel resources, such as the suspension of a plot to recover another that make the narrative tension remain.

Charlotte, the last survivor of the saga, the creator of "the first ugly heroine of literature," became famous and attended the same parties as Dickens or Thackeray. And he was responsible for making a sweetened image of his sisters as much as he vampirized, "not without reasons," his brother Branwell, addicted to opium and alcoholic and indebted and, in part, failed. Infernales delves into the daily and material life of a family of geniuses while explaining their literary worlds. By bringing realism to the myth it magnifies it.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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