The Third Sister Speaks

In The Third Sister Speaks Liliana A Pasterska immerses us in the voice of Anne Brontë—a frontierswoman and trailblazing writer of the mid 19th century who stepped out of ‘female’ territory to expose the taboos of her age, including gender inequality, marital abuse, the terrible conditions in which many women teachers worked and the effects of alcohol and substance abuse. A woman at the margins of her time, Anne Brontë lived for only 29 years, yet left a wealth of acute observation and sharp insight in her writing, as well as poetry that witnesses to her personal, spiritual and literary intelligence.

For all of this, her voice is the one not often heard amongst the extraordinary Brontë sisters. But here is a corrective to this. In lyrical poetry originally commissioned for a programme of music and words celebrating Anne Brontë’s bicentenary, we enter Anne’s world. In this careful and beautifully achieved debut pamphlet, the voice of the poet reaches into the voice of a young woman still calling to the modern reader across time: elegant, spare, leaving space for silence and allowing its questions to resonate long after reading:

I am a teller of truth a seer—can you hear me?