This reading group guide for Brontë’s Mistress provides an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Finola Austin. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Yorkshire, 1843: Lydia Robinson, mistress of Thorp Green Hall, has lost her precious young daughter and her mother within the same year. With her teenage daughters rebelling, her hateful mother-in-law breathing down her neck, and her marriage grown cold, Lydia is restless and yearning for something more.
Change comes with the arrival of her son’s tutor, Branwell Brontë, brother of her daughters’ governess, Anne Brontë, and those other writerly sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Handsome and romantic, a painter and a poet, Branwell is twenty-five to Lydia’s forty-three. Colorful tales of his sisters’ elaborate playacting and made-up worlds form the backdrop for seduction, and soon Branwell’s intensity and Lydia’s loneliness find a dangerous match in each other.
Grave consequences for Lydia’s transgression loom. Her prying servants blackmail her for their silence, her husband becomes suspicious, and Branwell’s behavior grows increasingly erratic while whispers of the affair reach his bookish sisters.
With this swirling vortex of passion and peril threatening to consume everything she has built, the canny Mrs. Robinson must find the means to save her way of life, and quickly, before clever Charlotte, Emily, and Anne reveal all of her secrets in their deceptively domestic novels.
That is, unless she dares to write her own story first.
Deliciously rendered and captivatingly told, Brontë’s Mistress reimagines the scandalous affair that has divided Brontë enthusiasts for generations and gives voice to the woman vilified by history as the “wicked elder seductress” who allegedly brought down the entire Brontë family.