In commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth on July 30, 1818 (d. 1848), Oxford University Press has reissued its Companion to the Brontës, by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith and seven other contributors.1 Dozens of pages of maps, pictures, a section on Dialect and Obsolete Words, a Classified Contents List, and a three-column Chronology (The Lives of the Brontës, Literary and Artistic Events, Historical Events) accompany the nearly six hundred pages of compact, authoritative, and engaging (if frequently esoteric) entries with enormous variations in length.

These include “editing history of mature novels,” “verse dramas by Branwell Brontë” (there are...

 
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