A Girl Walks Into a Book What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women's Work

How many times have you heard readers argue about which is better, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights? The works of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne continue to provoke passionate fandom over a century after their deaths. Brontënthusiasts, as well as those of us who never made it further than those oft-cited classics, will devour Miranda Pennington's delightful literary memoir.
Pennington, today a writer and teacher in New York, was a precocious reader. Her father gave her Jane Eyre at the age of 10, sparking what would become a lifelong devotion and multiple re-readings. She began to delve into the work and lives of the Brontë finding that the sisters were at times her lifeline, her sounding board, even her closest friends. In this charming, offbeat memoir, Pennington traces the development of the Brontëas women, as sisters, and as writers, as she recounts her own struggles to fit in as a bookish, introverted, bisexual woman. In the Brontëand their characters, Pennington finally finds the heroines she needs, and she becomes obsessed with their wisdom, courage, and fearlessness. Her obsession makes for an entirely absorbing and unique read.

A Girl Walks Into a Book is a candid and emotional love affair that braids criticism, biography and literature into a quest that helps us understand the place of literature in our lives; how it affects and inspires us.

Miranda K. Pennington is a life-long Brontënthusiast whose work has appeared on the Toast, the American Scholar online, the Ploughshares blog, and the Catapult Podcast. She has been a writing consultant and University Writing Instructor at Columbia University, where she also received her MFA in creative nonfiction.

Pennington has also taught academic writing at Touro College, SUNY Empire State, and the LEDA institute; she has led creative writing workshops for the AmpLit festival and Uptown Stories, a Washington Heights-based nonprofit. A Girl Walks Into a Book is her first book.