May Sinclair

It is impossible to write of the Bronte sisters and forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The Bront s were a nineteenth-century literary family associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849), are well known as poets and novelists. Like many contemporary female writers, they originally published their poems and novels under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Their stories immediately attracted attention for their passion and originality. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works were later to be accepted as masterpieces of literature. The three sisters and their brother, Branwell (1817-1848), were very close and during childhood developed their imaginations first through oral storytelling and play set in an intricate imaginary world, and then through the collaborative writing of increasingly complex stories set therein. The deaths of first their mother, and then of their two older sisters marked them profoundly and influenced their writing, as did the relative isolation in which they were raised. Their home, the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire, now the Bront Parsonage Museum, has become a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Anne Bront (17 January 1820 - 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Bront literary family. The daughter of Patrick Bront , a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England, Anne Bront lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. She also attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837. At 19 she left Haworth and worked as a governess between 1839 and 1845. After leaving her teaching position, she fulfilled her literary ambitions. She published a volume of poetry with her sisters (Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846) and two novels. Agnes Grey, based upon her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847. Her second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appeared in 1848. Like her poems, both her novels were first published under the masculine pen name of Acton Bell. Anne's life was cut short when she died of what is now suspected to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 29. Emily Jane Bront (30 July 1818 - 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third-eldest of the four surviving Bront siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell. Partly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was prevented by Charlotte Bront after Anne's death, she is not as well known as her sisters. However, her novels, like those of her sisters, have become classics of English literature. Charlotte Bront (/21 April 1816 - 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Bront sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels have become classics of English literature. She first published her works (including her best known novel, Jane Eyre) under the pen name Currer Bell.

IN THE BETWEENWhat if it is true? What if you don't go to Heaven...or Hell when you die? What if karma does exist? What if you do reincarnate into another life to try to learn about your past mistakes and get to balance out any of your or other's misdeeds? This is the story of a woman who dies and travels through the Bardo. Meaning she is going from one life to the next. The term Bardo comes from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Its meaning is loosely translated as: The In Between. According to the Tibetan text, Souls travel through the Bardo for 49 days, during which time they are encouraged to accept any one of numerous heavens.But our soul, in the story, is not Buddhist, she is from the West. And being the kind of woman she's become throughout countless lives-she believes she has lived-she developed her own unique belief system. In her ideas about the Bardo she gets to re-live some of her past lives to help with the evolution of her soul.Our soul agrees to re-live her past lives that took place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Spain, Brussels, France, England, the U.S., and India. During those lives she discovers why she made choices that made her more and more fearful and that also caused karma between several other souls that must be balanced in her future. Unless...But before any of that, right from the start, she is surprised to discover something odd about her soul when she first arrives at the Bardo. She learns about the complexity of the soul and how thinking people develop their ideas about God, the universe, energy, but most importantly why souls on planet earth, at all.