Five great literary subjects

The famed literary editor and author Robert Gottlieb's latest book is the new biography, Great Expectations: the Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens.

For The Daily Beast, Gottlieb named five great literary subjects, "those men and women who never cease to fascinate, whose lives we can follow again and again in various reiterations." One entry on the list:

The Brontës

The six children of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, all of whom predeceased him, two of them writers of genius. Their isolated life on the moors; the painful attempts at teaching and governessing; the disaster of the one boy, Branwell, brilliant and dissolute; the amazing success of Jane Eyre; the relentless loss of life to tuberculosis (although Charlotte died of complications connected to childbirth)—it’s so painful and moving a saga that no respectable biographer has failed it. The classic is the life of Charlotte by her close friend the brilliant novelist Elizabeth Gaskell; the most complete version is the series of individual volumes by the scholar Winifred Gérin. But don’t worry—you really can't go wrong.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue