‘Do you like the truth? It is well for you.
Adhere to that preference - never swerve thence.’

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

Lies and the Brontës

The Quest for the Jenkins Family

by Monica Kendall

  • Published April 2021
  • Publisher SilverWood Books
  • ISBN 9781800420052
  • Hardback 234 x 156mm (622 pages)
  • Illustrations 26 black and white images, 4 maps, 3 family trees
  • RRP £25.00

Also available from Bookshop.org, Book Depository, WHSmith, and wordery.com.

Reference has been made in [Charlotte’s] letters to Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the chaplain of the British Embassy. At the request of his brother – a clergyman, living not many miles from Haworth, and an acquaintance of Mr. Brontë’s – she made much inquiry, and at length, after some discouragement in her search, heard of a school.
– Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)

And yet after Mrs Gaskell, no biographer made inquiry about this Jenkins family – until now. Through many unpublished letters in archives from Australia to Cumbria to Aberystwyth, an extraordinary family has been revealed. Evan Jenkins went from a poor tenant farm in the middle of Wales to Cambridge University and ended as chaplain to the first King of the Belgians – Victoria and Albert’s ‘dearest uncle’. His wife Eliza was the largely Scottish granddaughter of a Provost of Aberdeen, but born in Rotterdam with Huguenot ancestry. She probably met John Keats when they were both teenagers, and the family would have known Walter Scott in Edinburgh. The Jenkins family also links Wordsworth, Thackeray, Trollope, the Liberator of South America, the father of Australian geology, and the man Jane Austen ‘doated on’.

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>Lies and the Brontës

Reviews

“The book is extremely impressive – staggering research and so well written. I am riveted [...] What riches! [...] a fantastic achievement. It’s some time since I felt so excited about a Brontë-related book!”

Helen MacEwan, author, and founder of the Brussels Brontë Group

“There is something strangely hypnotic about the whole narrative, especially early Welsh wanderings (the magic Ystrad Meurig! the bamboozled school inspectors!), and the later (brilliantly detailed and gossipy) re-creation of domestic life in mid 19th-century Brussels.”

Richard Holmes, the foremost biographer of Shelley and Coleridge

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Monica Kendall

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