Winifred Gérin is known as the biographer of the Brontës. In 1955 when she moved to Haworth, the home of the Brontës, she set out to write the biographies of all the Brontë children. In 1972 she completed that task, having written what are still considered standard biographies of Anne, Branwell, Charlotte, and Emily. Her husband, John Lock, along with W. T. Dixon, added to the project when he published the biography of the Reverend Patrick Brontë in 1965. Gérin also wrote two biographies on figures whose lives had touched Charlotte Brontë: Elizabeth Gaskell, who was Charlotte's first biographer, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who, at the age of thirteen, had met Charlotte at one of her father's dinner parties. Gérin has contributed much to Brontë research, and her biographies are marked by extensive research and an evocative...