189 - ] English Literature
Emily Bronte
Life
& Poetical Career
The
only poems by Emily Brontë that were published in her lifetime were included in
a slim volume by Brontë and her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), which sold a mere two copies and received
only three unsigned reviews in the months following its publication. The three
notices were positive, however, especially with respect to the contributions of
Ellis Bell—Emily Brontë. The writer of the review in the 4 July 1846 Athenaeum,
for example, noted her "fine quaint spirit" and asserted that she had
"things to speak that men will be glad to hear,—and an evident power of
wing that may reach heights not here attempted." It seemed in 1848, the
year of Emily's death, as if this potential were never to be realized. However,
Brontë's twenty-one contributions to Poems represented only a fraction of the
nearly two hundred poems collected by C. W. Hatfield in his noteworthy edition,
The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (1941). Several factors combined to
delay the publication of a complete, accurately edited collection of Brontë's
poems: her sister Charlotte, who in her heavy-handed revision of seventeen
unpublished poems by Brontë to accompany the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights,
first published in 1847, went so far as to add lines and whole stanzas; the
wide dispersal of Brontë's manuscripts after their sale in 1895 by Charlotte's
widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls; and finally the difficulty in reading the
manuscripts, some of which Brontë wrote in a tiny, crabbed script on irregular
bits of paper. Ranging from 1836 to 1846—fortunately, Brontë dated all but
about a dozen of her poems—these verses reveal that she had indeed reached the
heights attempted in the poems in the 1846 volume.
Unfortunately
the student of Brontë's biography cannot rely on the signposts she left on her
manuscripts and must try to reconstruct her life from a scarcity of material.
The plays and stories she wrote with her sister Anne about the imaginary land
of Gondal have not survived. Her other prose consists of seven essays in
French, a few notes, and four birthday letters she exchanged with Anne. Much of
what we know about Brontë is seen at a remove, through Charlotte's writings
about her or Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte. Myths about the family
abound, but Brontë seems to be the most mysterious figure of all of them. She
is alternately the isolated artist striding the Yorkshire moors, the painfully
shy girl-woman unable to leave the confines of her home, the heterodox creator
capable of conceiving the amoral Heathcliff, the brusque intellect unwilling to
deal with normal society, and the ethereal soul too fragile to confront the
temporal world. There is probably an element of truth as well as hyperbole in
each of these views. Again, the fault lies in part with Charlotte, who in her
effort to assuage the critical charge of "coarseness" aimed at the
author of Wuthering Heights wrote a "Biographical Notice of Ellis and
Acton Bell" to accompany the 1850 edition of that novel and Anne's Agnes
Grey. Of Brontë she wrote, "Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial
tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might
have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly
wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life. An
interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world." The
real identity of the poet who created the fierce queens of Gondal and the
visionaries of the subjective poetry lies somewhere between the shadowy myths
about Brontë and the documented facts .
Emily
Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire to
the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë, the fifth of their sixth
children after Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Branwell and the only daughter
to be given a middle name. Both parents displayed literary ambitions; Patrick
Brontë's The Cottage in the Wood, an Evangelical tale supporting Sunday schools
and castigating the evils of drinking, was published in 1815, and during the
same year Maria Branwell wrote an apparently unpublished piece titled "The
Advantages of Poverty, in Religious Concerns," a sincere and pious essay
exhorting the faithful to care for the poor. In the year of Emily's birth
Patrick's novella The Maid of Killarney was also published. Though Brontë
continued throughout her life to observe her father's writing of sermons,
articles, fiction, and poetry, she lost the example of her bright and vivacious
mother shortly after the family's move to Haworth in 1820. Weakened by the
birth of six children in as many years (Anne was born 17 January 1820), Maria
Branwell was unable to fight off illness and died of cancer on 15 September
1821. Her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved into the parsonage that same month
to help Patrick care for his young family.
That
Yorkshire played an important role in Brontë's life and art is indisputable.
Except for several brief absences, she chose to spend her remaining years at
the parsonage. However, many of the myths surrounding her life arise from the
time immediately after her mother's death, including the isolation of Haworth,
the harsh eccentricities of her father, the dour Methodism of Aunt Branwell,
and the abnormal upbringing of the Brontë children. Elizabeth Gaskell's The
Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), while admirable in many ways, was responsible
for some of these errors. Recent biographies, especially Juliet Barker's The
Brontës (1995), have sought to correct these misconceptions. Barker points out
that Haworth was a "busy, industrial township," that Patrick was an
involved and caring father who was ordained in the Church of England and was
heavily influenced by the Evangelical and Methodist teachings he encountered
while studying in Cambridge, that Aunt Branwell's upbringing as a Wesleyan
Methodist brought her closer to the gentler Church of England than to severe
Calvinist beliefs, and that the six Brontë children enjoyed a "perfectly
normal childhood" filled with games, lessons, religious education, and
walks on the moors. Close in age and temperament, they provided each other with
plenty of diversions. The Brontës' nursemaid, Sarah Garrs, reported that the
children's games "were founded upon what Maria read to them from the
newspapers, and the tales brought forth from the father's mines of tradition,
history, and romance." Emily's participation in the playacting and daily
walks would later significantly influence both her poetry and her fiction.
In
1824 several important changes occurred in the Brontë household. First, Sarah
Garrs and her sister Nancy left the family, and Tabitha Aykroyd was engaged.
Tabby remained with the Brontës until her death in 1855 and was accorded a
place in the Haworth parsonage that far exceeded that of a mere servant. One of
the few recorded incidents from Brontë's childhood also occurred during this
year and illustrates the normalcy of the Brontë children's upbringing as well
as the interest of their father in their development. Patrick Brontë, in
helping Gaskell collect appropriate information for her biography of Charlotte,
wrote her in a 30 July 1855 letter that he had used a mask to elicit honest
responses from his children to his individual queries, "thinking that they
knew more than I had yet discovered." He gave each one the mask and
"told them all to stand and speak boldly." He asked Brontë, then aged
about six, what he should do with her brother, Branwell, "who was
sometimes a naughty boy." She answered, "Reason with him, and when he
won't listen to reason, whip him." This answer seems to have arisen more
from Emily's experience as a member of a large, active, and noisy set of
siblings than from a quiet, doleful, and studious group.
More
importantly, 1824 was the year that Patrick sent all of his daughters except
Anne to Cowan Bridge School, a "School for Clergymen's Daughters."
Patrick, though in possession of a perpetual curacy at Haworth, owned no land
or inheritance and therefore had few options for providing for the future of
his children. As in most Victorian families the bulk of the family income would
be spent on the son's education. Yet Patrick knew he needed to enable his
daughters to seek livings, most probably as teachers or governesses, and hence
they needed to be educated. Miss Evans, the superintendent of the new school,
called Brontë a "darling child" and "little petted Em," and
the admissions register referred to her as "quite the pet nursling of the
school." Tragically for the Brontë sisters, during the time they attended
Cowan Bridge School it closely resembled the fictional Lowood School presented
by Charlotte in Jane Eyre (1847). The staff at Cowan Bridge School was careless
with respect to food preparation, and during the winter the rooms were often
cold. The Brontë sisters had always been susceptible to coughs and colds, and
the difficult physical conditions at Cowan Bridge most likely hastened Maria's
and Elizabeth's contraction of consumption. They were sent home to die in 1825;
after Patrick saw how ill Elizabeth was, he went to Cowan Bridge to collect
Charlotte and Brontë himself. According to most biographers the deaths of their
elder sisters most profoundly affected Charlotte, who had more complete
memories of their deceased mother and now had also lost the sisters who had
filled the maternal role. As Barker notes, all of Charlotte's heroines were
orphans, and nearly all of the children in Wuthering Heights also become
motherless. In her poetry many of Brontë's Gondal characters are also
motherless, orphaned, or the children of parents who abandon them.
Between
1826 and 1829 Emily began music lessons, completed samplers, and made drawings
and sketches of the natural subjects such as birds to which she was drawn for
the remainder of her life. Her close observations of birds, animals, plants,
and the changing skies over Haworth form a significant part of her poetry.
During this time Branwell acquired several sets of toy figures such as
soldiers, Turkish musicians, and Indians. These toys were the impetus for the
founding of the imaginary lands of Angria and Gondal. The children began to
write plays about the figures, with Emily and Charlotte composing "bed
plays" that they kept secret from the adults as well as from Branwell and
Anne. In "Tales of the Islanders" (1829) Charlotte gave a history of
the early plays, underscoring Emily's early affiliation with the works of Sir
Walter Scott, for she chose the Isle of Arran for her island and Scott for her
"cheif [sic] man." This affinity grew with Aunt Branwell's 1828 New
Year's gift to "her dear little nephew and nieces," a copy of Scott's
The Tales of a Grandfather (1827-1829). In addition to Scott's works the Brontë
children drew material for their plays from the family library of Aesop's
Fables, The Arabian Nights' Entertainment, and wood-engraver Thomas Bewick's
History of British Birds. Their most important influence during these early
years was most likely Blackwood's Magazine, whose satires, political
commentaries, and extensive book reviews provided them with a wealth of detail
that seeded their imaginations throughout their early years of creativity.
In
1831, after Charlotte left for Roe Head School, Emily and Anne began to
concentrate their energies exclusively on the Gondal saga, distinct from the
Angrian fantasies of their brother and sister, a special form of imaginative
play in which the two younger sisters alone engaged for the remainder of their
lives. Emily's first mention of Gondal occurs in her diary paper for 24
November 1834, a series of notes written by Emily and Anne about every four
years and the earliest piece of Brontë's writing to have survived. The first
paragraph of the entry reads, "Taby said just now Come Anne pilloputate
(i.e. pill a potato) Aunt has come into the kitchen just now and said where are
you feet Anne Anne answered On the floor Aunt papa opened the parlour door and
gave Branwell a letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt
and Charlotte--The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine Sally
Mosley is washing in the back kitchen." In addition to noting the astonishing
absence of punctuation conventions in the sixteen-year-old Emily's diary entry,
critics uniformly point to her seamless fit of the imaginary Gondal into the
fabric of everyday events in the Brontë kitchen.
Scholars
such as W. D. Paden in An Investigation of Gondal (1958) have deftly recovered
much of the history of Gondal despite Charlotte's destruction of the plays and
prose after her sisters' deaths, from the birthday notes, the undated lists of
character names Anne wrote, the list of place names she wrote into a copy of J.
Goldsmith's A Grammar of General Geography (1819), and Emily's and Anne's
Gondal poems. Most recognize, however, their own creative responsibility in
such a reconstruction, for while Brontë wrote almost seventy poems that are undoubtedly
part of the Gondal story, the majority of her poems cannot always be attributed
to Gondal, and many are clearly more personal lyrics. Scholars therefore find
Fannie Ratchford's Gondal's Queen: A Novel in Verse (1955), an attempt to fit
the whole of Brontë's poetic output into the Gondal fantasy, an interesting but
far-fetched effort. What can be determined is that Gondal, according to Anne,
was "a large island in the North Pacific" and that Gaaldine was
"a large island newly discovered in the South Pacific." The rigorous
scenery of these islands derives much from Scott's fiction and is filled with
mountains, heather, and snow. The Gondal stories concern impetuous royalty,
political intrigue, love thwarted and abandoned, wars, murders, and assassinations.
In a noteworthy article in 1939 Helen Brown was one of the first critics to
point out the influence of George Gordon, Lord Byron, on Brontë's Gondal
characters and their isolation, passions, dark crimes, and darker thoughts. The
main character in Brontë's Gondal poems, the speaker of at least fourteen and
the subject of many others, is the passionate, dark-haired queen Augusta G.
Almeda, or A.G.A., perhaps based on Mary, Queen of Scots and the young Queen
Victoria, in whose accession to the throne Brontë took a good deal of interest.
A secondary character is Julius Brenzaida, king of Almedore in Gaaldine.
Critical
reception of the Gondal poems has been uneven. Some critics reject them for
their melodrama, formulaic qualities, and simplistic meters and rhymes.
Recently, however, feminist critics have taken special note of the prominent
role played by the queen, A.G.A. Christine Gallant, for example, calls
attention to the fact that Gondal is "a mythic world emphatically
excluding the real world" known to Victorian women, controlled by a
"dominating presence of female figures." Teddi Lynn Chichester
believes that Brontë was continually working through her own loss of
significant female figures, that "through Augusta, Brontë could explore,
in private, her need to create a powerful, even indestructible" woman, and
that A.G.A. "ultimately reinforced the disturbing connection between
mortality and the feminine" that is such a potent undercurrent in Western
literature. Richard Benvenuto points out that without the years Brontë spent
"developing her Gondal imagination, the mature imagination she did attain
would have been a considerably different mode of vision." While a
knowledge of the facts of Gondal can deepen the reader's understanding of
Brontë's creative life, we can still appreciate the poems for their merits
apart from their place in the Gondal saga. In writing the Gondal poems Brontë
took on different voices and personae, and the themes of imprisonment and death
that inform her better-known poetry were first explored therein. The dark and
overpowering emotions first manifested in these poems certainly fed her
invention of Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
The
luxury Brontë enjoyed of freely flowing from domestic responsibilities at the
parsonage to the world of Gondal and the mental and emotional sustenance she
found therein was cut short in July 1835, when she accompanied Charlotte, now a
teacher, to Roe Head. For Brontë--removed from her routine for the first time
since she was six years old, extremely reticent and impatient with the other
pupils in the school--the experiment was unhappy and unsuccessful. Moreover,
because her daily schedule was now rigidly proscribed, she had no time to
engage in the intellectually sustaining creation of the Gondal stories, and she
was no longer living with Anne, her partner in the fantasy. Charlotte later
recalled her firm belief that Brontë "would die if she did not go home,
and with this conviction obtained her recall." Charlotte understood only
too well the void caused by the absence of "sources purely
imaginary": she too grieved for her inability to interact with her visions
of Angria. The combination of homesickness and creative deprivation forced
Brontë home in October 1835, but her dependence on Yorkshire to free her poetic
originality should not be overstated. She forced herself to leave home again
two more times, to teach at Law Hill and to study in Brussels, and these
journeys broadened rather than stultified her inventive abilities.
Brontë
spent the three years following her return from Roe Head at home, and since
Anne had replaced her at the school, she became responsible for many of the
domestic duties at the parsonage, especially after Tabby broke her leg. Brontë
found time, however, to continue the Gondal saga and, more importantly, to
practice her poetic craft. Though traumatic, her brief time at Roe Head and
subsequent return to Haworth evidently intensified a new resolve to concentrate
on her poetry. Her first extant poems are from 1836 and display some of the
treatments of nature and death she was to concentrate on for the remainder of
her life. For example, in "Will the day be bright or cloudy?" and
"High waving heather 'neath stormy blasts ending," a poem Stevie
Davies calls a "precocious bravura piece," Brontë adapts her close
observation of natural phenomena to poems that examine and accept the
two-faceted essence of the day's evolution and the changing weather. In
"Start not upon the minster wall" she explores the comforting rather
than threatening affinity of the living and the dead.
Brontë's
diary paper of 26 June 1837 records Anne's writing of a poem, her own work on a
volume of Augusta Almeda's life, Queen Victoria's accession to the throne, and
her corresponding interest in the coronation of the emperors and empresses of
Gondal and Gaaldine. She wonders where she and her siblings will be in four
years and expresses three times the hope that whether they are in "this
drawing room comfortable" or "gone somewhere together comfortable"
that all will be for the best. The note is observant and cheerful and perhaps
reflects the satisfaction Brontë took in her extensive composition of poetry
during the year. Poems such as "The night of storms has passed,"
"A.G.A. to A.E.," "Now trust a heart that trusts in you,"
and "Song by Julius Angora" reveal a poetic exploration of Gondal
corresponding to her Gondal prose. Her other poems from this period are
somewhat problematic for critics in that, as Derek Roper says, they "plainly
deal with fictional situations" yet do not belong to the Gondal cycle.
Throughout her poetic career Brontë assumed personae who did not necessarily
speak for her, and while it is difficult to assign certain poems to her own
voice, it is important to be wary of attaching too much significance to the
thoughts and feelings expressed in this fictional poetry. However, a poem from
1837 underscores in what seems to be Brontë's voice her need to express herself
in poetry. The speaker asks heaven why it has denied the "glorious gift to
many given / To speak their thoughts in poetry" and wonders why she cannot
transmute her visions, available to her since "careless childhood's sunny
time," into poetry. An aspect of this need can also be found in "I'll
come when thou art saddest," a poem written in 1837, in which the speaker
is the imagination, what Barker calls "the great comforter," upon
which all of the Brontës relied for sustenance and consolation.
Brontë
continued her poetic productivity throughout 1838, from which twenty-one dated
poems have survived. Also surviving from this time are fragments of her
translation of Virgil's Aeneid and notes on Greek tragedies, evidence that
tends to contradict the fallacy that Brontë's was an uneducated mind from which
sprang an amazing quantity of poetry and the remarkable Wuthering Heights.
Sometime in the autumn of 1838 she made the surprising decision to accept a
teaching position at Law Hill, a girls' school outside Halifax, a fact recorded
in a letter from Charlotte to Ellen Nussey that, though dated October 1836,
Edward Chitham revealed was postdated October 1838. Benvenuto speculates that
Brontë went to Law Hill because she felt guilty enjoying the pleasures of home
while her sisters were laboring at Roe Head. Though Charlotte wrote to Ellen
Nussey that Brontë's duties at Law Hill constituted "slavery," Barker
points out that Brontë had time to write what she calls "three outstanding
poems." One of these was "A little while, a little while," a
poem in which Brontë synchronizes the "dungeon bars" of her duties at
school and her disparate choices of imagining during her "hour of
rest" either the comforts of Hawthorn, the "spot 'mid barren
hills," or Gondal with its "distant, dreamy dim blue chain / Of mountains
circling every side." Charlotte was correct in surmising that Brontë would
"never stand" the "hard labour" at Law Hill--she left the
school in March or April 1839, worn out by homesickness and the lack of time
she could devote to poetry and Gondal. Her return home again freed her from the
"dungeon bars"; though she apparently wrote no poetry during the
first three months of 1839, she left twenty-nine dated poems from the remainder
of the year. She revisits some of her favorite natural subjects in poems such
as "Mild the mist upon the hill" and "The starry night shall
tidings bring," though often nature is unable to give solace to
grief-stricken speakers. Brontë takes a more philosophical approach in "I
am the only being whose doom," in which the speaker despairs to find
"the same corruption" in "my own mind" as she has seen in
all of "mankind," and "There was a time when my cheek
burned," in which the speaker finds that her ardent devotion to truth,
right, and liberty are misplaced, for the "same old world will go rolling
on" unaffected by her passion or her indifference.
In
her 30 July 1841 birthday note Brontë, though pleased that she and her family
are all "stout and hearty," expressed her wish that four years hence
she and her sisters will no longer be "dragging on" but will have
carried out their "scheme" for setting up a school of their own.
Though ultimately the plan was never realized, Emily and Charlotte attempted to
improve their teaching prospects by studying French with Constantin Heger at
the Pensionnat Heger, a boarding school for girls in Brussels, arriving in
February 1842. After he recognized the sisters' intellectual strengths and
their aptitude for French, Heger personally tutored them, having them read and
analyze works in French and then compose their own essays based on these
models. Though Brontë was unable to complete any poems while she was in
Brussels, her composition of a prose allegory, "Le Palais de la
Mort," influenced the second of the two poems she began,
"Self-Interrogation." Both essay and poem personify Death, and in the
poem Death logically convinces the human speaker in the dialogue that his life
has been empty and that he has nothing left to live for. As Janet Gezari points
out, "despite the ray of hope in the last two lines, this poem is among
Brontë's glummest," its bitterness surely reflective of Aunt Branwell's
November 1842 death, which caused Brontë and Charlotte to depart the Pensionnat
for Haworth. Though Charlotte returned to Brussels in January 1843, Brontë
remained in Yorkshire for the remainder of her life.
In
February 1844 Brontë began to copy her poems into two notebooks, one titled
"Gondal Poems," the other left untitled. Though early critics such as
Winifred Gérin distinguished Gondal poems from "personal" poems on
the basis of Brontë's division, later critics such as Roper and Barker caution
against rigidity in approaching the poetry in this way. The act of copying
itself suggests that Brontë took her poetry seriously and wanted to have a more
permanent structure for it than scraps of paper allowed, even if at this point
she did not even contemplate publication. In the autumn of 1845, however, a
momentous discovery occurred. Charlotte recalled, "I accidentally lighted
on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting." Despite Brontë's
anger and sense of betrayal at her sister's "unlicensed" intrusion,
its "taking hours to reconcile her to the discovery" Charlotte had
made and "days to persuade her that such poems merited publication,"
Brontë eventually was won over to the idea of sending her work out to
publishers along with some by Charlotte and Anne. The sisters spent the
remainder of the year selecting and revising their poetry, Brontë choosing
poems largely written in 1844 and 1845 and being careful to delete any
references to the private Gondal. They took the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and
Acton Bell and agreed to publish Poems at their own expense with the publishing
company of Aylott and Jones in 1846.
Many
critics agree that Brontë's poetry from Poems is her strongest. Lawrence J.
Starzyk, for example, calls attention to the "beautiful lyrics" of
"A Day Dream," where the "sustained dialogue of the mind with
itself is masterfully executed as the despondent narrator converses with the
joyous spirit of nature." Davies refers to "To Imagination" as
"that classic, rational and balanced defence of imagination as an
alternative faculty to reason." Barker believes that "The
Prisoner," originally a Gondal poem, is "rightly one of Emily's most
famous, as it includes the powerful and intensely emotional description of the
captive's vision." Perhaps because Derek Stanford thinks that Brontë wrote
only six major poems, his reading of "Death" and the
"vertiginous and vertical excitement that seems to give this poem wings"
is particularly striking. In one of the few stylistic analyses of Brontë's
poetry C. Day Lewis finds that the effect of the rhythm in
"Remembrance" is "extremely powerful, extremely
appropriate" and that "it is the slowest rhythm I know in English poetry,
and the most sombre." Roper concludes simply that "the selection that
Emily made for 1846 includes some of her best poems."
Other
than a long narrative Gondal poem from late 1846 and a shorter incomplete
revision of the same from May 1848, Emily's last poem, much anthologized and
perhaps the most commented upon, was "No Coward Soul Is Mine,"
written in January 1846. Tom Winnifrith calls it a "fitting culmination of
Emily's poetic work," admiring the fineness of its "pantheistic
vision"; Starzyk finds that the contradiction in the poem "represents
a profound insight into the nature of the universe and man's attempt at finding
permanence therein." This creation of a minister's daughter is indeed
astonishing for its blunt rejection of orthodox religion-
Vain are the thousand creeds
That
move men's heart, unutterably vain
Worthless
as withered weeds
Or
idlest froth amid the boundless main
--coupled
with its embrace of a truer and more sustaining omnipresence of God:
With
wide-embracing love
Thy
spirit animates eternal years
Pervades
and broods above,
Changes,
sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.
Brontë
reveals her ability to actually know the supreme being who is the Alpha and
Omega of whom she learned in the Bible when she was but a small child:
Though
Earth and moon were gone
And
suns and universes ceased to be
And
thou were left alone
Every
existence would exist in thee.
Barker
points out that "No Coward Soul Is Mine" is the "only statement
of its kind in all of Brontë's extant writings," and so readers should not
be quick to assume that the speaker is Brontë herself. However, the immediacy
of the poem and the authenticity of the voice suggest that Brontë was not
taking on a persona but indeed sharing her deeply felt relationship with God.
We will unfortunately never know if she intended to continue to write poetry in
this vein. Whether she was too dismayed by the lack of response to Poems or too
distracted by the composition of Wuthering Heights, Brontë devoted little of
her remaining two years to writing poetry.
In
a 6 April 1846 letter Charlotte wrote to Aylott and Jones that "C., E.,
and A. Bell are now preparing for the press a work of fiction, consisting of
three distinct and unconnected tales": Charlotte's The Professor (1857),
Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Thomas Newby eventually
consented to publish the latter two novels, which came out in December 1847.
The first reviewers were mystified and puzzled by the strangeness and savagery
of Wuthering Heights, although nearly all recognized the seductive power of the
novel and the original vision of its author. Twentieth-century critics have
recognized the ways in which the Gondal poetry, with its isolated and
terrifying scenery, its passionate and grief-stricken characters, provided
Emily with a wide stage on which to rehearse the similar scenery of Wuthering
Heights and the characters of Cathy and Heathcliff in the novel. However, the
critic who perhaps most perceptively synthesized the poetic and fictional
halves of Emily's creative aptitude wrote at the end of the nineteenth century.
A fellow poet, Algernon Swinburne, referred to Wuthering Heights in a 16 June
1883 article as "essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most
positive sense of the term."
Little
is known of the last two years of Emily's life, although her family endured
some severe trials. Patrick was nearly blinded by cataracts, and Branwell, who
had never realized his artistic potential, had returned home dependent on
alcohol and disgraced because of an affair with his employer's wife. Branwell
became ill with what probably was consumption in early September 1848 and died
later that month. Emily Brontë fell ill with consumption in October 1848 and
refused all medical help, claiming that even homeopathy "was only another
form of quackery." She steadily grew weaker and died on 19 December 1848.
She was thirty years old.
The student of Emily Brontë's poetry must sort through various
contradictions in order to approach her work with even a little confidence. She
wrote most of her poetry during what is technically the Victorian period, but
her exploration of the self, the imagination, and the visionary associate her
more closely with Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth than with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning. She was a
woman poet who did not bemoan the lack of "literary grandmothers," as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning did, and seemed to have little familiarity with
female predecessors such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. She
was a serious poet who, like her peers Emily Dickinson, John Clare, and, later,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote dozens of poems with no intention of publishing or
even showing them to her family. She is far better known for her one
mind-searing novel than for her poetry, but since early in the twentieth
century few years have passed without some article, book, or new edition
devoted to her verse. Her life remains an enigma; her poetry refuses easy
classification. Yet Brontë's fierce willingness to confront in her poetry the
most profound intellectual, theological, and emotional challenges to the human
spirit assures her a continuing place in the minds of readers who seek guidance
through those obstacles in poetry .
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