Books: The Parson's Daughters

THE BRONTË STORY (368 pp.)—Margaret Lane—Duell-Little ($5).

It is almost 100 years since an English novelist named Elizabeth Gaskell found herself journeying to a sleepy parsonage in Yorkshire, where lived the Rev. Patrick Brontë, an old man, craggy and almost blind. Her mission was to write a biography of Parson Brontë's daughter Charlotte, who had died of consumption only a few months earlier, at 39, in the full flush of her fame and notoriety as the author of Jane Eyre. Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë proved to be one of the great English...