![]() After this point, Emily began more seriously to compose and collect her poetry aside from a stint in 1842 at a school in Brussels, she did not return to formal education. An attempt at 17 to attend the school where Charlotte was teaching, Roe Head, ended in illness Emily returned home and Anne took her place at school. After a brief spell at a charitable school for clergymen’s daughters – where Emily’s two eldest sisters contracted the tuberculosis they died from in 1825 – the remaining Brontë siblings, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, were educated at home. Her father was an impoverished parson, and, after their mother’s death when Emily was three, the children were brought up with the help of their aunt. Snipping the chains of convention, Wuthering Heights was declared uniquely powerful, yet so savage and morally repellent that it was to plunge Ellis Bell, like it or not, into the public forum.’Īn extract from Patti Smith’s introductionĮmily Brontë (1818–48) grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, Yorkshire, the fifth of six siblings. She sternly adhered to her own sense of morality from which she would not waver, not even to appease her extremely vexed sisters. Emily was like a small volcano, dormant yet restlessly bubbling, and erupting through the words and actions of her chosen characters. ![]() She created a heroine spawned from interesting winds, reflecting her own emotional range, from inner waywardness to the deep restraint of self-deprivation. Charlotte and Anne’s protagonists sought redemption, equilibrium. Those who are not passionate are pallid, and those languishing from passion develop a color of their own – that of death. She drew from her restive pulse and unleashed the unquiet apparition of Catherine Earnshaw, whose pale fingers reached from the grave as if to paralyze the breath of her soul’s predestined mate. ‘And what hath Emily wrought? No such earned splendor. Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre each would be obliged to overcome numerous trials before securing constant and fulfilling love-on-earth by book’s end. In an act of proud defiance, Charlotte created the small, plain and beloved Jane Eyre. Anne offered her own double with the gentle, empathetic Agnes Grey. ![]() At the ink-stained table, scarred in the center with a candle-burn the size of a small hand, each conceived of her heroine – drawing from the sap of their particular situations. They had written since childhood a form of comradely self-entertainment, inventing scandalous histories, warring countries, duelling kings – their own game of thrones. ‘Through the endless winter of 1847 the Brontë sisters paced, sparred and provoked one another. They are a beautiful, fittingly haunting accompaniment to an unforgettable story. She captures the swirling moorland air that blows through the book, and merges, just as the novel does, past with present, ghosts with the living. This edition contains nine evocative illustrations from illustrator Rovina Cai. The novel has inspired many film-makers, musicians and artists over the years. And we shudder when Heathcliff, hearing of Cathy’s death, curses her: ‘May you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then!’ I am Heathcliff!’, the reader thrills in response. ![]() When Cathy cries out, ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Yet even its detractors could not help but acknowledge the book’s raw power and tumultuous energy. In 1848, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine gasped that it was ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In the writing of Wuthering Heights she did not give what was wanted she gave what she had’Ĭertainly Brontë’s contemporaries were not sure the book was what they wanted – especially when they discovered the author was a woman. ‘Her untied mind did not create a neat package.
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