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Emily Brontė (1818 - 1848) - pseudonym Ellis Bell |
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Perhaps the greatest writer of the three Brontė sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Emily Brontė published only one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story of the doomed love and revenge. The sisters also published jointly a volume of verse, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Only two copies of the book was sold. "I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!" Catherine declared, emphatically — and she seemed to speak sincerely. "Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is — an unreclaimed creature, without refinement— without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head, pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He's not a rough diamond — a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them — I say let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged: and he'd crush you, like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge." (from Wuthering Heights: Vol. I by Ellis Bell [Emily Brontė], London: Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847, pp. 229-230) Emily Brontė was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her father, the Rev. Patrick Brontė, had moved from Ireland to Weatherfield, in Essex, where he taught in Sunday school. Eventually he settled in Yorkshire, the centre of his life's work. In 1812 he married Maria Branwell of Penzance. Patrick Brontė loved poetry, he published several books of prose and verse and wrote to local newspapers. In 1820 he moved to Hawort, a poverty-stricken little town at the edge of a large tract of moorland, where he served as a rector and chairman of the parish committee. The lonely purple moors became one of the most important shaping forces in the life of the Brontė sisters. Their parsonage home, a small house, was of grey stone, two stories high. The front door opened almost directly on to the churchyard. In the upstairs was two bedrooms and a third room, scarcely bigger than a closet, in which the sisters played their games. After their mother died in 1821, the children spent most of their time in reading and composition. To escape their unhappy childhood, Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and their brother Branwell (1817-1848) created imaginary worlds – perhaps inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Emily and Anne created their own Gondal saga, which has not survived, and Bramwell and Charlotte recorded their stories about the kingdom of Angria in minute notebooks. After failing as a paiter and writer, Branwell took to drink and opium, worked then as a tutor and assistant clerk to a railway company. In 1842 he was dismissed and joined his sister Anne at Thorp Green Hall as a tutor. His affair with his employer's wife ended disastrously. He returned to Haworth in 1845, where he rapidly declined and died three years later. Between the years 1824 and 1825 Emily attended the school at Cowan Bridge with Charlotte, and then was largely educated at home. Her father's bookshelf offered a variety of reading: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott and many others. The children also read enthusiastically articles on current affairs and intellectual disputes in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, and Edinburgh Review. In 1835 Emily Brontė was at Roe Head. There she suffered from homesickness and returned after a few months to the moorland scenery of home. In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. Emily worked at Miss Patchet's school – according to Charlotte – "hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between." (Emily Brontė: Her Life and Work by Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, London: Peter Owen, MCMLIII, p. 42) To facilitate their plan to keep school for girls, Emily and Charlotte Brontė went in 1842 to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned on the same year to Haworth. Aunt Branwell died in 1842 . When she was no longer taking care of the house and her brother-in-law, Emily agreed to stay with her father. Unlike Charlotte, Emily had no close friends. She wrote a few
letters and was interested in mysticism. Charlotte said that Ellis"
(Emily) "will not be seen in his full strenght till he is seen as
an essayist." Her first novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story-within-a-story, did not gain immediate success as Charlotte's Jane Eyre,
but it has acclaimed later fame as one of the most intense novels
written in the English language. In contrast to Charlotte and Anne,
whose novels take the form of autobiographies written by authoritative
and reliable narrators, Emily introduced an unreliable narrator,
Mr. Lockwood. He constantly misinterprets the reactions and
interactions of
the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. More reliable is Nelly Dean, the
housekeeper, who has lived for two generations with the novel's two
principal families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons. There are other
narratives, too, but the perspectives of these two characters, one
outsider, one insider, dominate the story. Lockwood is a gentleman visiting the Yorkshire moors where the novel is set. At night Lockwood dreams of hearing a fell-fire sermon and then, awakening, he records taps on the window of his room. "As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window—Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!" and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear." (Ibid., Vol. I, p. 52) The hands belong to Catherine Linton, whose eerie appearance echo the violent turns of the plot. In a series of flashbacks and time shifts, Brontė draws a powerful picture of the enigmatic Heathcliff, who is brought to Heights from the streets of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw. Described as a racial outsider , he is dark, a "gypsy", a "little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway." Heathcliff is treated as Earnshaw's own children, Catherine and Hindley. After Mr. Earnshaw's death Heathcliff is bullied by Hindley, who forces him to labour out of doors. Being treated like a slave, he leaves the house, returning three years later. Meanwhile Catherine marries Edgar Linton. Heathcliff 's destructive force is unleashed. Catherine dies giving birth to a girl, another Catherine. Heathcliff curses his true love: "And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me then!" (Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 28-29) Heathcliff marries Isabella Linton, Edgar's sister, who flees to the south from her loveless marriage. Their son Linton and Catherine are married, but the always sickly Linton dies. Hareton, Hindley's son, and the young widow became close. Increasingly isolated and alienated from daily life, Heathcliff experiences visions, and he longs for the death that will reunite him with Catherine. Wuthering Heights has been filmed several times. William Wyler's version from 1939, starring Merle Oberon as Cathy and Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, is considered on of the screen's classic romances. However, the English writer Graham Greene criticized the reconstructing of the Yorkshire moors in the Conejo Hills in California. "How much better they would have made Wuthering Heights in France," wrote Greene in his review. "They know there how to shoot sexual passion, but in this Californian-constructed Yorkshire, among the sensitive neurotic English voices, sex is cellophaned; there is no egotism, no obsession. . . . So a lot of reverence has gone into a picture which should have been as coarse as a sewer." (The Spectator, 5 May, 1939, page 16) Luis Buńuel set the events of the amour fou in an arid Mexican landscape. The music was based on melodies from Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner. There should be no despair for you Emily Brontė died of tuberculosis in the late 1848. She had caught
cold at her brother Branwell's funeral in September. She did not
believe in doctors despite how sick she was, but the illness made rapid
progress.
"If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now" were her last
words to Charlotte. (Last Words of Notable People: Final Words of More than 3500 Noteworthy People Throughout History, compiled by William B. Brahms, Haddonfield: Reference Desk Press, 2010, p. 91) She died on a sofa. Her coffin was only sixteen inches wide. After the
appearance of Wuthering Heighs, some skeptics maintained that
the book was written by Branwell, on the grounds that no woman from
such circumscribed life, could have written such passionate story. In
1848 Charlotte and Anne visited George Smith to reveal their identity
and to help quell rumors that a single author lay behind the
pseudonyms. After her sisters' deaths, Charlotte edited a second
edition of their novels, with prefatory commentary aimed at correcting
what she saw as the reviewers' misunderstanding of Wuthering Heights.
Its original manuscript has never been found. The complex time scheme of story has been taken as evidence by the critics, that Emily had not achieved full formal control over her materials. However, she had almost unbelievable memory and did not have any reason to worry about her capability to tell the complex story out of chronological order. Possibly her model in layering narrative within narrative was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Emily's refusal to reduce ambiguity to simplistic clarity did not have any immediate influence on the novel form until Wilkie Collins experimented with multivocal first-person narratives in such works as The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). For further reading: The Brontė's Web of Childhood by Fannie Ratchford (1941); The Genesis of Wuthering Heights by Mary Visick (1965); Their Proper Sphere by Inga-Stina Ewbank (1966); Emily Brontė: A Biography by Winifred Gérin (1971); The Brontės and Their Background by Tom Winnifrith (1973); Myths of Power by Terry Eagleton (1975); The Art of Emily Brontė, ed. by A. Smith (1976); Brontės of Haworth by Brian Wilks (1986); Emily Brontė by Stevie Davies (1988); Emily Brontė: Wuthering Heights by U.C. Knoepflmacher (1989); Women Writers: Emily Brontė by Lyn Pykett (1989); The Brontės by Juliet Barker (1994); Wuthering Heights by Maggie Berg (1996); Critical Essays on Emily Brontė, ed. Tom Winnifrith (1997); The Birth of Wuthering Heights by E. Chitman (1998); Emily Brontė by S. Vine (1998); The Brontė Myth by Lucasta Miller (2001); The Strange World of the Brontės by Marie Campbell (2001); Wuthering Heights on Film and Television: A Journey Across Time and Cultures by Valérie V. Hazette (2015); A Companion to the Brontës, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (2016); Facets of Wuthering Heights: Selected Essays by Graeme Tytler (2018); The Brontë Sisters: Life, Loss and Literature by Catherine Rayne (2018); Wuthering Heights: The 1847 Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, edited by Alexandra Lewis (2019); Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition by María Valero Redondo (2021); The Brontës of Haworth Moor: How the Three Daughters of a Country Parson Became the Most Revolutionary Novelists of Their Time by Diane Browning (2023; The Brontës and the Fairy Tale by Jessica Campbell (2024) - Museums and places to visit: Brontė Society and Brontė Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Keighley; Brontė Way; a forty mile walk in four section to sites associated with the Brontės; Oakwell Hall County Park, Nutter Lane, Birstall; the house features as "Fieldhead" in Charlotte's Shirley; The Red House Museum, Oxford Rd, Gomersal, Cleckheaton; the house appears as "Briarmains in Charlotte's Shirley; Wuthering Heights Walk, a six mile walk to Top Withins, the setting for Wuthering Heights. Selected works:
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