The Brontë children, inventing imaginary worlds in the wake of traumatising family deaths, would sometimes kill their characters: as "chief geniuses" they assumed power to resurrect the dead - "making alive again". Alas, in life - and fictional biography - no such principle obtains. The dead are dead for ever, however vitally their young voices seem to call from the page: "Cathy, do come! Oh, do - once more! Oh, my heart's darling, hear me this time!" Cathy cannot hear or come, but the violence of Heathcliff's desire generates a vivid reading experience that arouses the uncanny illusion that his cry might indeed be answered. Generations of haunted readers have been possessed by the sweet, terrible intensities of Brontë creativity.

All biography is a form of "making alive again"; so is biographical fiction, a form Jude Morgan has made his own. His 2004 novel Passion recreated the women entangled with Shelley, Byron and Keats. The Brontë story is, if anything, more familiar. Since Charlotte's death in 1855, generations of powerful writers from Elizabeth Gaskell to Daphne du Maurier, Juliet Barker and Lyndall Gordon have rewritten the Brontës' narrative of early loss, child prodigy, group creativity, feminist aspiration, romantic passion, great writing and early death.

The Taste of Sorrow enters into dialogue with many voices. Morgan chooses a discreetly quiet, understated and subtle style, pensive rather than passionate, shifting seamlessly among a varied cast of characters. Making a tactful choice of manner and sombre tenor, sifting his research scrupulously, he holds his nerve and reason where many a Brontë biographer fails. The novel represents first and foremost an attentive, sympathetic and fair-handed reading of the Brontë lives. His style is perfectly suited to characterising Anne; rises memorably to the conflicted Charlotte; makes only the most tenuous feint at representing the guarded inner world of Emily; has a fair shot at the impossible Branwell.

It is a style rich in metaphor and simile, often surprising, yet always apt. The tears of Maria, the dying mother, hearing the "high, fluting voices" of her soon-to-be orphaned children, "did not flow" but "covered her eyes, like watch-glasses". The beauty of this perception, seen from Patrick Brontë's perspective, comes not only from visual accuracy but through its focus on mortal time. Maria's death opens the novel: she does not die with deference but blasphemously, raising her voice - the mother of her children's powerful voices - in rebellion against her lot.

Morgan invents in the interstices of the narrative, the gaps in the weave, and such inventions are nearly always felicitous. I found myself deeply moved by the way he breathes life into the two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. His Anne is a spellbindingly lovely portrait: in the face of her failure in the working world, she "is still Anne; emotional apothecary, she investigates that bitter taste".

The world of The Taste of Sorrow is a dark one; it therefore situates itself in a long and lugubrious tradition. But I have a sharp sense that this was a family that enjoyed life to the quick. Sorrow is relative: in a world where millions of women were condemned to early death, illiteracy, child-bearing, pudding-making, these were educated women whose appetite for life was gratified by an uncommon portion of intellectual freedom, a chance to travel, to roam and write. The image of Emily kneading dough with a German book propped up before her is one of immense peace and wellbeing. When will someone write the antidote: A Taste of Joy?

This question apart, there is much to admire in Morgan's novel, especially when the style modulates to stream of consciousness. Emily's eye-view of the Ponden Bog Burst is brilliant writing; so are Branwell's opium lucubrations. The moving portrait of Anne sitting with the dying Aunt Branwell - prescient, proleptic, valedictory - is superb: it catches her real depth and unshowy virtue. This is a lovely book and deserves a wide readership.

 Stevie Davies's The Eyrie is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. To order The Taste of Sorrow for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop