'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 Brontё milieu. Surprisingly ignored until now, Cornish contextual networks and issues are shown to have been very significant in the creative evolution of the writers. / Place-histories 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, story-tellers, and published academics, critically influential in their day. Contents: Author's 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 & 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 John/Johns with links: Arundell, H Martyn (missionary), C Kingsley. Charles A Johns. / The Document register / Index