“A haunting and atmospheric historical novel.”
~ Library Journal
In 1846 Yorkshire, the Brontë sisters— Charlotte, Anne, and Emily— navigate precarious lives marked by heartbreak and struggle.
Charlotte faces rejection from the man she loves, while their blind father and troubled brother add to their burdens. Despite their immense talent, no one will publish their poetry or novels.
Amidst this turmoil, Emily encounters a charming shepherd during her solitary walks on the moors, yet he remains unseen by anyone else.
After Emily’ s untimely death, Charlotte— now a successful author with Jane Eyre— stumbles upon hidden letters and a mysterious map. As she stands on the brink of her own marriage, Charlotte is determined to uncover the truth about her sister’s secret relationship.
The Man in the Stone Cottage is a poignant exploration of sisterly bonds and the complexities of perception, asking whether what feels real to one person can truly be real to another.
Praise for The Man in the Stone Cottage:
“A mesmerizing and heartrending novel of sisterhood, love, and loss in Victorian England.”
~ Heather Webb, USA Today bestselling author of Queens of London
“Stephanie Cowell has written a masterpiece.”
~ Anne Easter Smith, author of This Son of York
“With The Man in the Stone Cottage, Stephanie Cowell asks what is real and what is imagined and then masterfully guides her readers on a journey of deciding for themselves.”
~ Cathy Marie Buchanan, author of The Painted Girls
“The Brontës come alive in this beautiful, poignant, elegant and so very readable tale. Just exquisite.”
~ M.J. Rose, NYT bestselling author
The Brontë Sisters
Well, of course since most of the characters in The Man in the Stone Cottage really lived, we know a great deal about them, their “motivations, conflicts and challenges.” We are fortunate in the Brontë family that they wrote many letters and largely people kept them. Charlotte was emotionally close to a reader at her publisher’s firm, to whom she wrote frequently and opened her heart. Shortly after Charlotte’s death, a friend (Mrs. Gaskell) wrote Charotte’s biography in which she made her a kind of saint. Biographers each since then have made their own interpretation of Charlotte and her motives. Some make her into an onery character. Some make her quite unkind.
So who really was Charlotte Brontë?
When I first delved into some of her hefty biographies some time ago, I was put off by her sharp, sometimes cruel words. I wanted her to be the saint into which her first biographer made her. Later I came to see she was more complex. Who would not be onery with an occasionally sharp tongue if they had not endured unnecessary deaths of loved ones, to have been treated callously and thought a lesser being as a governess because she had no family fortune? She was bursting with anger.
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| Charlotte Brontë |
Charlotte, like her fictional heroine, Jane, attended an awful charity school where she and three of her four sisters were hungry cold, punished … the result of the horrible class system in how people without private means were treated. Once out in the world, she knew that if she did not do well, her family would fall. In history she went and revealed her true self to her publisher in London, ostensibly because of some trouble with American publication rights but I felt (I still do) that something in her wanted at least to let her publisher know that the author of this fabulously selling novel was a small, brilliant woman. Over 175 years since it was first printed, women still feel a kinship in Jane’s cry, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart!”
Charlotte fought the world. At less than five feet tall, she took it on.
Emily, stronger and fiercer in some ways, retreated from it. She wanted nothing to do with the world. Away from the house, she was cold and mute and often ill. She wanted to be home with every common household task, her animals, her family, her baking and her writing. I can imagine this put a burden on Charlotte.
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| Emily Brontë |
Emily did not want to share her poetry or Wuthering Heights at first. She likely let them go in hopes of bringing some money into the house. Her imagination was fiercer and wilder than Charlotte’s, who allows Jane Eyre to step to the edge of morally deep waters but then firmly step away. She knows exactly what moral road will allow Jane to return to the abandoned Mr. Rochester. There is no stepping away with Cathy and Heathcliff. There is no moral road. There is only the wrestling of two passionate people in which there can be no resolution on the earth.
I think Anne Brontë stands between the characters of her sisters. Her novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was a shaky ground to Victorian readers. A woman abandons the bed and roof of her lawful husband just because he is an immoral drug addict and womanizer. It was common belief that women should endure. (Charlotte looked askance at Anne’s work.)
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| Anne Brontë |
As it comes down to us, Anne’s sisters are titans of their literary world, fighting for moral love for Jane and Rochester and love in any crazy, messy way for Emily’s characters. I think Anne holds the family to earth.
The three Brontë sisters! How we love them and how complicated they are! We see ourselves in them.
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Stephanie Cowell
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