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?
