When the first biography appeared in 1901 it provoked W E Henley's famously

When the first biography appeared in 1901, it provoked W E Henley's famously vituperative reaction against "the Seraph in Chocolate". "Since Byron was in Greece," Edmund Gosse once wrote to him, "nothing has appealed to the ordinary literary man as so picturesque as that you should be in the South Seas," and in the 20 years following Stevenson's death in Samoa, in December 1894, something approaching RLS mania broke out. THE CENTENARY of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson this month has provoked numerous publications, reprints and broadcasts, and anyone might be forgiven for presuming that the last word must have been spoken about him by now. And yet there's more sense of the sheer excitement of the fiction in these 247garrulous pages than in all Barker's doorstop.. There seems to be some kind of lesbian agenda here, and Davies is also keen to cut Emily free from the religiosity of her background. Where Barker works to rehabilitate Patrick and stern old Aunt Branwell, Davies busily redemonises them.

While Juliet Barker hesitates to suggest that Emily and Anne's bed-games had any sexual rather than Gondalian significance, Davies practically has her head under the sheets, emerging to identify masturbation as the primary sexual experience behind the novel. Listing Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Shakespeare and Milton among Emily's influences, she exlaims: "how paltry such light fare comes to seem in the light of Emily Bronte's achievement" This just leaves Homer as a fit comparison. Davies's partisanship knows no bounds, and occasionally leads her into silliness. For those with a passion for the Brontes, or for Victoriana, or for sheer wealth of historical minutiae, it is a stupendous read.Stevie Davies's approach is in total contrast. In Emily Bronte: Heretic she rushes in where Barker fears to tread, enthusiastically pulling out plums of biographical inference from Wuthering Heights.

As a work of scholarship it is brilliant: a random dip into the notes trawls up such fascinating detail as Arthur Bell Nicholls's insistence that his wife Charlotte's white and green wedding-dress, in which she looked "like a snowdrop", be burned rather than fall into the hands of curiosity-seekers. It is possible to close this huge book and still be somewhat confused about the chronology. Certain parts are brilliantly lit: the careless regime at Cowan Bridge school which led to fatal consumption for the two oldest Bronte children, Maria and Elizabeth; the deaths, painful and pitiful respectively, of Emily and Anne. Barker's Grad-grindian facts form a mesh through which something indefinable is draining away. Vast tracts of the book are painstaking lists of events; some of the most vivid descriptions are those copied from Gaskell or from letters.

His interest lay in politics while Charlotte introduced touches of the supernatural; they both gloried in warfare Anne and Emily's Gondal was a quieter realm. Far from hailing them as young prodigies, Barker points out how appalling their spelling is; Branwell writes "feild" right into adulthood.So keen is Barker to avoid the pitfall of substituting literary criticism for hard biographical fact that she avoids any in-depth discussion of the novels; the juvenilia and the poems (much of them doggerel) are given more prominence than, for example, Wuthering Heights, about which it doesn't seem quite sufficient to say it was a Gondal story tweaked into a Yorkshire setting. Blame Mrs Gaskell, again, for the "remote rural village of Brigadoon fantasy"; two of the first literary tourists offered to send the bemused Patrick Bronte a newspaper after reading of "backward" Haworth in her book. As Barker makes clear, regular perusals of the most up-to-date periodicals were essential for the Bronte children's first essays in composition, those minute but exhaustive chronicles of the imaginary kingdoms Angria and Gondal which Mrs Gaskell was later to describe as "creative power carried to the verge of insanity".Barker has studied these productions in depth, and it is here that Branwell finds his place in the story.

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