Charlotte Bronte: A Writer's Life

My one and only outstanding complaint about the reissue of this excellent biography is this: readers have no indication at all that this is a reprint of the original 1988 edition. I mistakingly thought that this biography was a revised, updated version of Rebecca Fraser's "The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family" published 20 years ago and printed in the United States as well as Great Britain. It's actually the exact same book with a different title. No new disclosures, no recent information, no varying critiques or revisionist perspectives, when indeed very often an author will update their own biographical subject as new artifacts and letters are discovered - and yes, authors will update their own works as much as 20 years later; it's been done with Ives' book on Anne Boleyn; a couple of bios on F. Scott Fitzgerald; Arthur Rimbaud, etc. There's been, if not exactly a wealth of discovery on the Brontes, still some certainly very definitive works and even superior biographies since Fraser's 1988 book: Juliet Barker stands out most distinctly, and in the past decade more letters have been found, and more newspaper articles contemporary to the Brontes' time. A theory's even been offered in a very well done mid-1990's bio on Charlotte that she died from acute gastrointestinal infection and not from the results of pregnancy sickness, although it's been pretty well determined from her correspondence that she was pregnant at the time of her death. To just offer the exact same book of Rebecca Fraser's - as complete for its time as it was; as sensitive and sympathetic as she is to her subject - with an altered title can and will fool readers into purchasing a volume they already own. It did me.