The Bronte Myth Lucasta Miller Jonathan Cape, 335pp, £18.99 ISBN 0224037455

"Happy women do not write . . . Their lives are rounded and complete, they require nothing but the calm recurrence of those peaceful home duties in which domestic women rightly feel their true vocation lies." From Women Writers: their works and ways (1892).

Lucasta Miller uncovered this little gem during her archaeological excavations of the mass of writing, critical, biographical, psychic and barking mad, that lies congealed upon the tombs of the Brontes. We can only be thankful that Charlotte Bronte - according to many of her biographers, starting with the ebullient Mrs Gaskell - remained in a psychotic state of depression and mental breakdown for much of her writing life. Had she felt differently, we would have had lots of completed domestic duties, but no books.

Miller's The Bronte Myth is a biography of biographies, an analysis of the cult of the Brontes and the process of myth-making - that is, "appropriating and ordering the scattered shards of the past to fulfil the needs of the present". The book begins laboriously. Miller rehearses the poignant but well-known facts about the Brontes' lives, making the important point that myth-making began with Charlotte herself, who carefully constructed her own image and that of the "brothers" Bell.

But the book really comes alive with the gossiping busybody presence of Mrs Gaskell, who committed all the biographical sins in her glorious rampage across the evidence. She set out to save Charlotte the woman - patient, suffering, dutiful, pious, martyred - from Currer Bell the author, coarse, unmaidenly, sexual, knowing. She nicks manuscripts from the grieving widower, paints the father, who actually commissioned the biography, as an eccentric tyrant, libels Branwell's employer and mistress, suppresses Charlotte's passionate love letters to a married man and gives Emily an invented reputation for beating up dogs. She then ran off on holiday to Europe when the book came out, leaving her unfortunate husband and publishers to face the legal actions and attendant scandals. Not surprisingly, the first Bronte biography was a bestseller and rapidly ran to three editions.

Miller is shrewd about Gaskell's agenda: she was defending her own position as a professional woman writer. Gaskell was facing the same barrage of patronising criticism and censorship, which awaited female authors guilty of overstepping the accepted limits of probity and delicacy. How can respectable, middle-class women write about sexual desire, domestic violence, irreligious sentiments and bad language if they know nothing of these? After all, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are bristling with all of the above.

The thrust of Miller's argument is against Bronte biography - speculative, insane or remorselessly factual - and in favour of critical analysis of the fictional and poetic texts. Her book is a parade of villainous fantasists who, when faced with gaps in the evidence, simply make it up. Emily must have had a lover. Who was he? Or she? Did Branwell, in fact, write Wuthering Heights? Was Ellen Nussey Charlotte's lesbian passion?

Heroines do emerge: Mrs Humphrey Ward, who eschewed the lives in favour of the works; Muriel Spark, whose 1953 essay on Emily is recommended; Stevie Davies, who offers intelligent readings and admits she can't prove that Emily had a lesbian consciousness. But the central irony of Miller's work is that a meta-biography will largely elide the literary texts and necessarily reproduce some of the Bronte bio-madness. Where, for example, is Anne Bronte, the darling mistress of Wildfell Hall? She remains overshadowed by her better-documented and more widely discussed sisters.

Miller is anxious to play down the juicier bits of Bronte scandal. The crazed band of lesbian critics and their sympathisers are just imagining things. She approvingly cites Stella Gibbons: "I suppose Anne Bronte wrote The Tenant of Radclyffe Hall." Charlotte's infatuation with Constantin Heger and the revelation of 29 July 1913, when the Times printed all four love letters, remain low key. Miller describes their meanings as "fugitive". I wouldn't have thought so. Thackeray's comments, which implied that Charlotte was a lonely, windswept spinster desperate for sex, were patronising and sexist, but not far off the mark. What he didn't know was that men were lining up, begging to marry her.

The most fascinating parts of this subtle and often very funny book are critical illuminations that Miller casts on the writers who recreated the Brontes in their own image. Olive Schreiner borrowed the plot of Wuthering Heights for her Story of an African Farm. May Sinclair transformed Emily into a spiritual presence who floated across the moors, rather than tramped. Plath and Hughes visited Haworth in 1956, and then fought over the meaning of their visit in poetry and prose for decades, even beyond the grave. These are afterlives for the texts, and the afterlives of the lives.

Patricia Duncker is a novelist

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