It’s almost impossible to read Douglas Martin’s new novel Branwell and not be reminded of Virginia Woolf’s creation of “Shakespeare’s Sister” in her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own. Woolf speculates about what might have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister with a similar literary genius to his own. Woolf plays out the imaginary details of the young woman’s tragic life—gifted with ambitions and talents for which she had no acceptable social or professional outlet, Shakespeare’s imaginary sister is tortured by her “poet’s heart…caught and tangled in a woman’s body” and takes her own life, her existence negated by a society and history shaped by men.

Martin’s new novel Branwell can be viewed as both a beautifully lyrical and literary response to Woolf’s speculation. His book is a dramatization of the troubled life of Patrick Branwell Bronte, the very real brother of the very famous Bronte sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte. Martin’s book suggests that it’s not gender, education and opportunity, that absolutely determines if genius will flourish. As we see in this sensitive portrayal of Branwell’s short life in the first half of the nineteenth century, physical illness and addiction, as well as emotional, social and sexual displacement can trap the creative soul in a prison in which there is no escape except death.

Patrick Branwell Bronte was born in 1817, the only son of Patrick and Maria Bronte who called him Branwell, his mother’s maiden name. Growing up in the secluded parsonage in a small Yorkshire village of Haworth, Branwell and his sisters enjoyed the unique opportunity of being privately tutored by their clergyman father in Greek, Latin, geography, literature and other traditional subjects that fueled their passion for storytelling and creative expression. Branwell and the women Brontes spent years creating the imaginary kingdoms of Gondal and Angria whose inhabitants lived lives of intrigue, romance and mysteries that were painstakingly transcribed into tiny books the children bound themselves. The dramas in these books are often linked to the novels—Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tenant of Wildfell Hall—that eventually make Charlotte, Emily and Anne and their respective heroes and heroines immortal literary figures.

But the siblings’ early lives were also marked by illness and death—their mother Maria died when they were very young, followed by their two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. Martin portrays the deaths of both Marias as creating a deep sense of irreparable abandonment and loss in young Branwell. Throughout the novel, as Martin leads the reader through Branwell’s slow spiral into alcoholism, opium addiction and self-destruction, he uses sparse, haunting prose that relies on well known biographical events while imbuing those events with measured feeling and nuance. The novel evokes sympathy for this only Bronte boy and complicates the sometimes simplistic portrayal of Branwell seen in earlier books about the Brontes. Martin refuses to dismiss Branwell as the alcoholic, arrogant ne’er do well who failed in every way his sisters succeeded. One of the major accomplishments of this novel is Martin’s ability to guide us through the events in Branwell’s life without making up lengthy episodes of dialogue or inserting abundant, artificial details that might undermine his credibility as a biographer. Instead, Martin carefully and skillfully uses content from some of the same letters, poems, scraps of prose, historical newspapers and other documents that shaped earlier Bronte biographies, but he weaves them together in new ways in order to show us the deeper, richer colors of Branwell’s life. He also contributes new ideas to what we know about Branwell challenging some traditional Bronte mythology.

Branwell the novel is consistently heartbreaking and provocative as Martin asks us to peer into Branwell’s head and heart, demonstrating how the young poet’s life revolved around a series of tormenting desires between his need to find a suitable profession and inability to hold a job, between his social ambitions and his emerging sexual preference, between his gifts for storytelling and poetry and his failed attempt to be a portrait painter, between his desire for familial acceptance and his blossoming masculine ego, and, coloring all of this is the alcoholism and opium addiction that helped hasten his death of chronic bronchitis and consumption at age 31.

Martin’s poignant, third person narrative of Branwell’s lives also gives us finely detailed glimpses of the more familiar Brontes. Charlotte’s stern, disapproving older sister persona, Emily’s brooding but loving presence, and Ann’s quiet, pensive, spiritual strength are juxtaposed to Branwell’s tragic romanticism. As the remote, authoritative father who outlived all his children by decades, and was passive and silent in the face of < Branwell’s professional failures and public addictions as he struggled with his own failing eyesight, Patrick Bronte’s life appears almost as heartbreaking as those of his famous literary offspring who all died of illness before age 40.

The irony of Martin’s Branwell is that the one Bronte child who was given social and professional opportunities to make his name as an artist, and encouraged find his way in the public sphere that was denied his sisters, is not the one who made the Bronte name famous. Charlotte, Emily and Ann used their lack of money and status, their classical education, social isolation, and their evocative physical surroundings as the emotional core of their poetry and fiction and changed forever the landscape of the “woman’s novel.” Martin shows his readers how and why Branwell was unable to productively harness his creative genius and unique passions and, like Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, his subject may have died poor and obscure, but is not forgotten.