Branwell traces the life of Branwell Bronte, the sole brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, from childhood to his alcohol and opium induced death at the age of 31. As the only son, Branwell is expected to make the fortune for the family, and immortalize the Bronte name. He is given no formal education, but is painstakingly tutored by his father, and writes endless stories and poems with his sisters in their small parsonage home.
Haunted by the early deaths of his mother and sister, both named Maria, and the imaginary worlds Angria and Gondal he and his sisters create as children, Branwell is unable to touch his heart's desire: to be a great artist. Forever discontent, he roams from job to job, as painter, railway man, and tutor, constantly writing and sketching. He sinks further into his own disappointment at great expectations, as his sisters spin and fume on the dark moor with the stories that will immortalize them.
Douglas A. Martin probes the locus where history and myth collide, and with language as rich and dark as the windswept, rainy moors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, gracefully uncovers Branwell Bronte's almost forgotten lost loves and thwarted talent, while circling around his nameless sexuality. Maintaining the haunting quality of childhood memory throughout, Branwell is a genre bending exploration of the tragic figure of Branwell Bronte and the dismal, dazzling landscape that inspired his sisters to greatness.

Douglas A. Martin was born in Virginia in 1973 and spent his childhood being raised in Georgia. In 1998, he moved from the South to New York, where he has taught writing at the New School for Social Research since 2001. Beginning as a poet and dramatist, Martin then moved to the novel form, and he has concentrated most of his creative energies here since his first full-length prose work Outline of My Lover. His writing remains a hybrid of sorts, informed by a love of the projects of Acker, Colette, Duras, Ernaux, Guibert, Handke, Leiris, and Nothomb; it has been anthologized in SLAM, Bend, Don't Shatter, Dangerous Families: Queer Writing On Surviving, Best Gay Erotica 2000, 2002, 2003, and Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative; and it has been adapted in part by the Ballett Frankfurt for their multimedia production "Kammer/Kammer" He is currently a PHD Candidate in English Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has written both critically and lyrically on aspects of Virginia Woolf, The Lost Boys, Sylvia Plath, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Arundhati Roy, pornography, Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein.

(Excerpt from middle of book, regarding Branwell's implied feelings for the young boy he is tutoring.)
Love was a thing to keep covered up.
Branwell draws himself in bed, the sheets drawn up between his legs, his head turned to the side, his hand reaching across his chest, his hand touching the tip of his right breast. His other hand reaches down again to the sheets. His heart is under there.
It is still in there in his head, the vision, even when he closes the book.
He was dreaming, dreaming only, when he shut his eyes and waited for Maria to come and touch him, to reassure him, to come and kiss him goodnight, come and take him back. If there was anything he wanted, all a boy had to do was ask in his sleep, and the dreams would surely come.
They'd link arms while walking, walking around the grounds, walking like that even up in into the hall, he and the boy playing at being Maria. They'd take turns. He'd told the boy there was nothing above them but what they dreamed they needed to heal them. He called this Maria, not God. He couldn't tell Edmund what love was, because the love felt in Angria was a stranger love. Sometimes it could even happen between a master and a child.
Charlotte knows. Charlotte knows what it feels like to be in love. She had been waiting for detailed accounts of how her brother was getting on with his pupil, the boy with a sweet temper. But her brother had stopped writing.
The boy, he mumbles to Emily, was going to go away for some time with his parents to the seaside, but then he was going to come back, so Branwell could marry his mother.
He goes on like this, dreaming aloud while Emily attends to him.
He wants to believe he'll be going back to Thorp Green.
But he's delusional. And when young Edmund's mother marries again, she'll be sure it's to a man with a title.
*
Even when Branwell tried to draw Lydia, there was something about her that looked only like his mother.
Any further affection must be displaced.
Their only son.
Young nerves should not be shaken so.
His mind drifts off towards the clouds on the ceiling stable of the room, his movements he tries to make swim there, faces he tries to make appear, holding himself in his hand.
From the hall, one of his sisters he couldn't make out looked in at him, their brother who'd finally snapped, drowning in his poems of miseries. He'd never be able to get away from their voice in the hall, calling out to him, underneath everything, all he could have been.
He'd accidentally called the boy Maria. The boy hadn't minded. He could tell by the way the boy had held it out to him that he wanted him to take his arm.
He was to be groomed like the studs. All that stood before him was all those men there only to bring him his horse.
His mother calls them Irish. It's whispered to Young Edmund. That's how she distinguished herself from them, one of the ways.
Let him show Edmund how to hold a man down on the hay, to then be up above him, his form still so unmolded by life, by men and their fights. The men in the stables often drank and let themselves go as men must be able to do. Young Edmund had stood there before them all, one drunken night, his nature held in by the walls swallowing and dumbfounded.
He wanted to know what they were talking about, wanted it all explained to him.
But he was to be kept sheltered.
What would his mother say, if she knew he was out there like that.
There's someone who sees everything they do.
He knew he was not supposed to be in there. His parents are too afraid to get too close to the likes of those who work for them, to see what might happen in the stables at night. He'd taken the boy's arm, to take him back out of there. It was as if the boy's body had folded up into his then, backing up into his, putting his face up against his chest. He'd once pressed against his mother in such a way. Young
Edmund had buried his face there in Branwell's leg, yelling.
He'd wanted something more.
Their brother tells Emily he wants to lie on the ground, not on the bed, on the straw she must imagine with him.
Help him down.
Emily, he says. The straw still holds an imprint, can't she see that.
There would inevitably be a fictive aura to everything he said, when he wrote of the affair to his friends in letters. He was living a romance for them in his head. Those who knew him, really knew him, believed if advances had been made, towards the boy, he would have only shrunk from them.
He had to convince them.
They might see he's been lying about many things, concerning the wife.
John Brown wants the details of the whole affair. How could Branwell not oblige him, having been with this great lady. Write letters to John Brown, tell John Brown all about it, the way it happened. She'd been like a flower, all good things, purity herself. The men he writes to, they must feel it, too. What were the words they used with each other.
John Brown wants more details.
Branwell writes to his friend Grundy at the railroad, afraid Grundy might burn the letter, once he recognizes the handwriting, Branwell Bronte, with that scrawl more and more illegible towards the end of his life.
She'd fallen ill, his Lydia, from a lack of attention.
He'd given his word, to return to her. You see, she'd been mistreated, neglected by her lawful husband.
He'd been a tutor to the great Lady's son, a boy still in his whelphood.
The Robinson bloodline ran deep, far back. He'd been so much better there than on the railroad, so well provided for. How kind the boy's mother had been. She'd been practically like a second mother to him. He'd been so pampered. Now he was not allowed back on any grounds.
It was love, and that's what he'd call it until his very end.
How quickly these declarations might be repeated to the wrong person.
It was rare, a woman of such sweet temper. How could he not have been tempted.
If it's beginning to sound like a romance, it was. They should all know that.
She'd remarry one day.
But it won't be Branwell.
After all, what did he have to offer such a Lady.
His troubled pleasure, soon chastised by fear.
What if they had gotten caught.
Sometimes he would accompany one or two of the horse grooms into town.
Or the new gardener, a man who might know a thing or two about where to plant the wild Irish rose.
That new gardener wouldn't work for them for too long. He didn't live there on the grounds.
He'd often have to go sleep it off in the stables.
But Branwell's charge would be there bright and early.