Winifred Gerin

The biographer Winifred Gerin (1901-81), wrote on all the lives of the four Bront siblings. She also wrote about Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Fanny Burney. This book is based on her letters and on her unpublished memoir. Gerin's childhood and youth, like the Bronts', was characterised by a cultured home and intense imaginative life shared with her sister and two brothers, and by family tragedies (the loss of two siblings in early life). Her happy life in Paris with her Belgian cellist husband, Eugene Gerin, was brought to an abrupt end by the Second World War. After Eugene's death in 1945 Winifred coped with bereavement through poetry and playwriting until discovering her true literary metier on the trip to Haworth. On the same visit she met her second husband, a Bront enthusiast twenty years her junior.