The weather has been rotten, not that I’m complaining when you consider what other people have to put up with at the moment. But it means that I haven’t been able to get on with any gardening. I decided against painting the woodwork in Duncan’s old room because it’s too cold and wet to keep the window open and the paint would take forever to dry.

So I’ve been reading a lot, in fact I have a backlog of 6 book blogposts. I was truly happy that Harriet Dark was a quick read because I felt that I had been conned. It was published in 1978 and it says on the front cover that it’s Branwell Bronte’s Lost Novel. Honestly, the liberties that some people take with a name when people are dead!

The story was a melange, or if you prefer, a mish mash of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and some bits of it were a straight lift from Rebecca. In fact there wasn’t anything original in the story, the names of characters were even Bronte family names, and I think that if Branwell, who was an alcoholic and drug addict, had had the self-discipline to write a book during his chaotic life, it would have been a lot wilder than Harriet Dark.

I wouldn’t have been so annoyed about it except that I did read the first paragraph of the dustcover blurb and it says: Barbara Rees has ingeniously reconstructed this novel.

I admit that I can be nit-picking where words are concerned. The dictionary definition of ingenious is: Clever at inventing, constructing, organizing, etc. Harriet Dark doesn’t come near ingenious.

Branwell is supposed to have described to his friends and family a novel which he had written but no evidence of it has ever been found. Mind you, it does make you wonder what a book by Branwell Bronte would really have been like.

Sometimes when you’re listening to a new tune it doesn’t go quite the way that you think it should and inevitably you think that you could improve on it. Harriet Dark is sort of the bookish equivalent in that anybody with an interest in the Brontes who read it would think that they could do better. Now there’s a challenge!