Actually. the Bronte girls got their literary talent from the Carne side as their Aunt Elizabeth spun wonderfully wild and woolly tales of Cornwall. So there Philip Carne This new book explores the important maternal background of the great literary family. In highlighting the background of their Cornish mother and her family it provides a major and fresh source of cultural understanding of the Brontampamp1105 milieu. Surprisingly ignored until now Cornish contextual networks and issues are shown to have been very significant in the creative evolution of the writers. Placehistories of Yorkshire and Ireland have been exhaustively investigated as backdrops to Bront writings. Largely unacknowledged however is the influential agency to their writings that Cornwall as a mental and spiritual legacy also offers. This new illustrated study captures the whole milieu in which Maria Elizabeth and their kinship circle grew up in Cornwall known even then as a legendary and romantic place. In their everyday life were a number of journalists travellers poets storytellers and published academics critically influential in their day. Contents Authors note and acknowledgements. List of illustrations. Introduction. Part 1 Place and time Living at the edge the Penwith Hundred Creators of Penzance A legendary place stories and storytellers And then came Wesley The everyday. Part 2. sisters and the cousins and aunts. The naming game Identification and patterns Branwells with links Bronte Carne H. Davy PRS Botterell Fennell Batten Johns Kingston Pellew ampamp Carthew Reynolds Lovett Chartist Carnes with links Cock Polwhele Fox Bolitho Vyvyan Southey Thackeray Coleridge Davies Giddy Gilbert PRS Wesley brothers. Battens with links Cristal Wollstonecraft Malthus G Dyer Clapham Sect L Stephen V Woolf. The JohnJohns with links Arundell H Martyn missionary C Kingsley. Charles A Johns. The Document register Index