CHARLOTTE BRONTE: THE EVOLUTION OF GENIUS by Winifred Gerin. 617 pages. Oxford. $8.
Art is often the artist's escape. Such was the case of Charlotte Bronte, the most prolific of the Brontë sisters, who flowered briefly in England during the 1840s with strange, powerful novels and poetry. Charlotte was shy and ugly, proud and ambitious. Her three novels, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, are all switches on the old Cinderella theme: the rejected girl is not only poor but plain; her Byronic hero must see not only through the rags but also through the...
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