A more apt title for this psychobiography of Emily Brontë would be A Soulfood Chain. It argues, you see, for a strong connection between Emily Brontë’s artistic sensibility and her eating habits. The willowy, stubborn child of the moors who never loved, but who knew all about tempestuous passion and wrote about it in lyric poetry and Wuthering Heights, was anorexic. Or so biographer Katherine Frank has decided to claim.
Emily Brontë, like her sisters Charlotte and Anne, lived in her imagination. Even more so than they, she shunned contact with society and reveled in a life of cooking and cleaning for her widowed clergyman father at the rugged Haworth parsonage. She died at age thirty of the tuberculosis to which her family was prone (it claimed the lives of her siblings Maria, Elizabeth, and Branwell Brontë before her, Miss Frank reports.)
The Emily Brontë who emerges from this book does seem to have the nunlike purity and unearthly imaginative powers of such purported anorexics as St. Catherine of Siena. But no evidence is presented to bolster Frank’s suggestion that her subject wrote beautiful poetry under the influence of “trance-like states—provoked perhaps by hunger and fasting.” In three cases Brontë apparently refused to eat so that her father would do her bidding: once so a favorite servant who had fallen ill would be allowed to remain at Haworth, and twice so she would not have to stay at boarding school. The minute she returned to the