Books: Brother, Sisters

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PATTERN FOR GENIUS—Edith Ellsworth Kinsley—Dutton ($3.50).

Three sisters in 1846 wrote three romantic novels. One of them was of such vitality that nearly a century later it is making money for Samuel Goldwyn. Of the seven novels the Brontë sisters produced, Emily's Withering Heights has been hung up to dry as a movie, and Charlotte's Jane Eyre is a pickled classic. The darkling moodiness of these books reflects the Brontes' unnatural seclusion in an English village parsonage, where genius was forced like strawberries in a hothouse. The three girls, who were intended to be housewives, reached fame; their only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë, for whom a "pattern for genius" was traced, was a failure. The effect of his disintegration on his sisters' writings was profound, and he appears in their novels under various names. This is a lucky thing for his biographers, of whom the latest is Author Kinsley.

In his childhood Branwell Brontë showed as precocious a talent for writing as his sisters did, and added to it an ability to paint. His father idolized him, earmarked him for fame, then spoiled him and his chances. The darling of the family, Branwell enjoyed his tantrums unchecked; he grew to be an irresolute exhibitionist. When he began to realize that he was only a frustrated artist, he took the byroad to ruin via liquor and laudanum, while his helpless family stood by and watched.

To Charlotte, Branwell's death at 31 meant "the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a bright and shining light." Emily loved him most. "Drive me mad," she had prayed bitterly in Wuthering Heights, "but do not leave me in an abyss where I cannot find you." Her own death came twelve weeks after his.

Edith Ellsworth Kinsley has searched the Brontë novels and poems for the character of Branwell and her technique in presenting Branwell's biography is to change the fictional names in autobiographical passages to the real names, juggle tenses, link wholesale quotations in chronological order. Because one Brontë is as inconceivable as one Dionne, she has found herself as much enmeshed in the sisters' patterns as in Branwell's.