The most gifted of her famous, troubled family, Emily Bronte has too often been portrayed in "storm-tossed, sentimental" biographies, according to Katherine Frank. Now Frank presents a startling new interpretation: pledged to self-denial and social isolation, Emily starved herself, contributing to her wild imagination. 16-page insert.
"A fine retelling of the Brontës' story . . . It does much to throw light on the achievement of one of the greatest geniuses of nineteenth-century literature."--The New York Times Book Review

In this compelling, beautifully written book, Emily Brontë emerges for the first time in the full complexity of her nature--the most gifted and intelligent of the Brontë sisters, and also the most passionate, willful, and self-destructive. Katherine Frank, whose biography of Mary Kingsley won wide critical acclaim, brings a novelist's dramatic flair and a brilliant gift for analysis to this bold reinterpretation of Emily Brontë's life: the negligence of her sickly father, her affliction with anorexia, the fierce need to rebel that produced Wuthering Heights and her magnificent poetry.

Probing the depths of Emily Brontë's dark nature as no other biographer has done, Frank also sheds new light on her special place in her gifted, doomed family and her consuming relationships with Charlotte and her alcoholic brother, Branwell. A Chainless Soul paints an intimate, vivid, and deeply affecting portrait of one of the greatest, and most misunderstood, artists of nineteenth-century fiction.