Was Rochester a murderer? Did the Reverend Bront carry a loaded pistol? What, precisely, does 'Wuthering' mean? Did the Bront s all have tiny feet?

To celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Bront 's birth, eminent Victorian scholar John Sutherland takes us on an A to Z ramble through the world of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bront (and not forgetting their dissolute brother Branwell).

For fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, here is a lighthearted miscellany freighted with a working lifetime's scholarly expertise. With his reputation for intensely close reading of Victorian literature, John Sutherland explores the Bront s' lives, their characters, their novels and poems, and the ways in which we interpret them today -- and above all he digs out those unexpected nuggets of fact that illuminate their perennially popular works.