More seriously, and in some detail, Miller explores the persistent, and she thinks insidious, legacy of Mrs Gaskell's 1857 Life of Charlotte Brontë, the 'Ur-biography' and the work that transformed Charlotte from the 'coarse' Currer Bell into a mid-Victorian self-denying 'angel in the house'. The fact that in Howarth the Brontës have a distinctive and picturesque shrine for pilgrims to visit is not an insignificant part of their continuing success as literary icons. We learn, for example, that Emily was voted 'twentieth most erotic person of the millennium' by readers of the Erotic Review that a recent ballet biography of the sisters represented the moors with dancers in tie-dyed sarongs and that in 1994 the Brontë Society organised a contest in which members competed to see which of their dogs most resembled the Brontës' pets, Keeper and Grasper. All this is done with a deft and light touch, and the excesses and bizarre confusions of Brontëmania are revealed with wry and engaging humour. She also draws on recent scholarly work on mid-Victorian culture. She digests a plethora of material on the Brontës and their cultural 'afterlife', not only in the biscuit tins and tea-towels of Howarth, but also in film, all manner of fiction and, indeed, literary criticism itself. Miller provides both her own critical biography of the Brontës, with an inevitable emphasis on Charlotte, and what she calls a metabiography - a consideration of the way that the writers' lives, as well as their works, have, over the years, been appropriated for all sorts of cultural purposes. In a sketch (available on LP) she plays a guide whose tour of the Parsonage largely involves pointing at the window and telling the group that the wind out there is probably 'wuthering', and that in the restaurant the health-conscious might like to try the Branwell burger.

Perhaps the funniest of recent demythologisations was that undertaken in the early 1980s by comedian Victoria Wood.

In 1904 Henry James spoke disparagingly of readers' 'beguiled infatuation' with the story of the sisters, and Miller claims her own starting point was Terry Eagleton's 25-year-old Myths of Power, a study of the 'literary industry' surrounding the Brontës. If the Brontë myth has a long and enduring history, so too does its debunking.

Lucasta miller the bronte myth