Lyn Reid Banks II

Dark Quartet is quite a good read but Im not sure how accurate it is, in terms of the lives of the Brontes. I think that Banks' research was based on what was available at the time and she tended to use all the stories about the Brontes that were available. Path to the Silent Country starts soon after Charlotte was left alone. Her father was depressed and afraid that he would lose his only remaining child so he fussed over his daughter and made her more anxious. He was very old and not too well and most of the parish work was being done by Arthur Nicholls. Nicholls was not too popular in the village and Patrick didn't like him much but he was forced to depend on him.He enouraged Charlotte to go for visits to her new literary friends, and was eager to hear of who she met and what life was like in London. Charlotte grew close to her publisher, George Smith, and his staff, and she tried to start writing again on her novel Shirley. She had abandoned the novel while the girls were ill and took it up again. Smith was eager to get the novel to publish as he had had a great success with Jane Eyre and hoped that another big novel from Charlotte would help his ailing firm. However she found it hard to get back to the book after a gap and the subject matter, (the Luddite Riots in Yorkshire) was not a good choice for her. She wanted to try and write about social problems but it was not her forte. She met Harriet Martineau, a writer and political activist who was scandalously an atheist, and in spite of their differences she made a friend of her. In London, she met Thackeray and other writers but did not always like them much. She was shy and unsophisticated and found them hard to understand. She was annoyed that Thackeray seemed so pleased to be a society figure and to associate with upper class ladies, as she wanted to believe he was a moralist which he was not. She was also annoyed when her new friends began to let slip the secret that she was Currer Bell the novelist when she had tried so hard to preserve her anonymity. When the news leaked out, she was upset that the literary set expected her to say clever things and participate in society life, while she was very uncomfortable with this and preferred to talk to the governess at one party. She also fell out with George Henry Lewes, George Eliot's live in partner, who told her that she and he had both written "naughty books", and she was furious at the implication that her book Jane Eyre was in any way naughty or immoral.