"The Life of Charlotte Bronte" by Elizabeth Gaskell

I have been thoroughly enjoying this book. It was written by a fellow novelist in 1857, several years after Bronte's death, and is filled with elegant sentences and heartfelt descriptions of Bronte, a good friend of Gaskell's. I have especially enjoyed the passages about the close friendship among the five Bronte sisters.  Living out on the remote and bleak moorland of North Yorkshire, and raised without a mother (she died when the girls were very young), the sisters stayed close and helped each other have  full and satisfying lives as they grew up. Gaskell describes them walking out on the moors, hand in hand, for hours, when the oldest, Maria, was not yet in her teens.  Here is how the author describes it:
"The [five] little creatures used to walk out, hand in hand, towards the glorious wild moors, which in after days they loved so passionately; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things.”