Branwell Brontë survives in literary history largely as wreckage around the achievements of his sisters.

He the failed brother, the addict, the doomed young man fading at the edge of the famous family portrait. Daphne du Maurier’s biography reconstructs the imaginative world Branwell shared with Charlotte, Emily and Anne, tracing the elaborate childhood kingdoms, poems and private mythologies from which all four siblings began—and asking why only his gifts collapsed under the weight placed upon them.

Du Maurier is drawn to Branwell because he was indulged as the family’s male genius, burdened with ambitions his sisters were largely denied, then steadily undone by professional disappointment, emotional fixation, alcohol and laudanum. The irony is brutal: the child expected to carry the Brontë name became its cautionary footnote, while the sisters working beyond public expectation produced the books that endured.

Published in 1960, this is biography written with a novelist’s feeling for enclosure, fantasy and psychological descent. For readers interested in literary families, failed artists, addiction, Romantic self-invention and the strange economies of talent and expectation. 

Penguin Books, 1987 reprint. Paperback with creasing, rubbing and edge wear; pages lightly aged, binding sound.