Emily Brontë

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Emily Brontë (1818-1848). Portrait by Patrick Branwell Brontë. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Emily Brontë
Born	Emily Jane Brontë July 30 1818(1818-Template:MONTHNUMBER-30) Thornton, West Yorkshire, England
Died	December 19 1848(1848-Template:MONTHNUMBER-19) (aged 30) Haworth, Yorkshire, England
Pen name	Ellis Bell
Occupation	Poet, novelist, governess
Nationality	English
Genres	Fiction, poetry
Literary movement	Romanticism
Notable work(s)	Wuthering Heights
Relative(s)	Brontë family
Influences The Holy Bible, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, John Milton, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë
Influenced Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Carson, Phillip Roth, Alice Munro, Thomas Hardy, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Anne Brontë, J.K. Rowling

Emily Jane Brontë (30 July 1818 - 19 December 1848) was an English poet and novelist, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, a classic of English literature.

Life

Overview

Emily was the 2nd eldest of the 3 surviving Brontë sisters, between Charlotte and Anne. They were the the daughters of Rev. Patrick Brontë, a clergyman of Irish descent and of eccentric habits who embittered the lives of his children by his peculiar theories of education. Brought up in a small parsonage close to the graveyard of a bleak, windswept village on the Yorkshire moors, and left motherless in early childhood, she and her sisters Charlote and Anne took to literature and published a volume of poems under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, which, however, fell flat. Emily, a woman of remarkable force of character, reserved and taciturn, published in 1848 Wuthering Heights, a powerful, but somewhat unpleasing, novel, and some striking poems.

Youth and education

Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, near Bradford in Yorkshire, to Maria (Branwell) and Patrick Brontë. She was the younger sister of Charlotte Brontë and the 5th of 6 children. In 1824, the family moved to Haworth, where Emily's father was perpetual curate, and it was in these surroundings that their literary gifts flourished.

After the death of their mother in 1821, when Emily was 3 years old, the older sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where they encountered abuse and privations later described by Charlotte in Jane Eyre. Emily joined the school for a brief period. When a typhus epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth caught it. Maria, who may actually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Emily was subsequently removed from the school along with Charlotte and Elizabeth. Elizabeth died soon after their return home.

The 3 remaining sisters and their brother Patrick Branwell were thereafter educated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell, their mother's sister. In their leisure time the children created a number of paracosms, which were featured in stories they wrote and enacted about the imaginary adventures of their toy soldiers along with the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters (The Brontës' Web of Childhood, Fannie Ratchford, 1941).

The three Brontë sisters, in a 1834 painting by their brother Patrick Branwell. From left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. (Branwell used to be between Emily and Charlotte, but subsequently painted himself out.)

When Emily was 13, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a large island in the North Pacific. If they wrote stories or novels about Gondal, these were not preserved. Some "diary papers" of Emily's have survived in which she describes current events in Gondal, some of which were written, others enacted with Anne. One dates from 1841, when Emily was 23: another from 1845, when she was 27. Anne made a list of Gondal names and places which also survives.

At 17, Emily attended the Roe Head girls' school, where Charlotte was a teacher, but managed to stay only 3 months before being overcome by extreme homesickness. She returned home and Anne took her place. At this time, the girls' objective was to obtain sufficient education to open a small school of their own.

Career

Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School in Halifax, West Yorkshire, beginning in September 1838, when she was 20. Her health broke under the stress of the 17-hour work day and she returned home in April 1839. Thereafter she became the stay-at-home daughter, doing most of the cooking and cleaning and teaching Sunday school. She taught herself German out of books and practised piano.

File:Constantinheger1.jpg

Constantin Heger, teacher of Charlotte and Emily during their stay in Brussels, on a daguerreotype dated from circa 1865

n 1842, Emily accompanied Charlotte to Brussels, Belgium, where they attended a girls' academy run by Constantin Heger. They planned to perfect their French and German in anticipation of opening their school. Nine of Emily's French essays survive from this period. The sisters returned home upon the death of their aunt. They did try to open a school at their home, but were unable to attract students to the remote area.

In 1844, Emily began going through all the poems she had written, recopying them neatly into 2 notebooks. One was labelled "Gondal Poems"; the other was unlabelled. Scholars such as Fannie Ratchford and Derek Roper have attempted to piece together a Gondal storyline and chronology from these poems.

In the fall of 1845, Charlotte discovered the notebooks and insisted that the poems be published. Emily, furious at the invasion of her privacy, at first refused, but relented when Anne brought out her own manuscripts and revealed she had been writing poems in secret as well.

In 1846, the sisters' poems were published in one volume as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The Brontë sisters had adopted pseudonyms for publication: Charlotte was Currer Bell, Emily was Ellis Bell and Anne was Acton Bell. Charlotte writes in the "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell" that they chose "Christian names positively masculine" to dissuade any bias on the premise of their gender. The poetry, which was mostly if not all of Emily's, received unfavourable reviews. It was this that drove them to begin their earliest professional novels.

File:The Climb to Top Withens. - geograph.org.uk - 393405.jpg

The Climb to Top Withens, Yorkshire, 2007.

n 1847, Emily published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as 2 volumes of a 3-volume set (the last volume being Agnes Grey by her sister Anne). Its innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics.Although it received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was often condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book became an English literary classic. In 1850, Charlotte edited and published Wuthering Heights as a stand-alone novel under Emily's real name.

Emily's health, like her sisters', had been weakened by unsanitary conditions at home(Citation needed), the source of water being contaminated by runoff from the church's graveyard(Citation needed). She caught a cold during the funeral of her brother in September 1848. She soon grew very thin and ill, but rejected medical help and refused all proffered remedies, saying that she would have "no poisoning doctor" near her. She died on 19 December 1848 at about two in the afternoon. She was interred in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels family vault, Haworth, West Yorkshire.

Writing

Critical introduction

by Edmund Gosse

Not even the unstinted praise of 3 great and very dissimilar poets has given to Emily Brontë her due rank in popular esteem. Her work is not universally acceptable, even to imaginative readers; her personality is almost repulsive to many who have schooled themselves to endure the vehemence of genius but not its ominous self-restraint. Most people were afraid of Emily Brontë’s ‘whitening face and set mouth’ when she was alive, and even now that she is dead her memory seems to inspire more terror than affection. Against an instinctive repugnance it is in vain to reason, and in discussing her poetical quality we must assume that her power has at least been felt and not disliked by the reader, since "you must love her, ere to you she should seem worthy to be loved."

Those who have come under the spell of her genius will expect no apology for her intellectual rebellion, her stoic harshness of purpose, her more than manlike strength. She was a native blossom of those dreary and fascinating moorlands of which Charlotte has given, in a few brilliant phrases, so perfect a description, and like the acrid heaths and gentians that flourish in the peat, to transplant her was to kill her. Her actions, like her writings, were strange, but consistent in their strangeness. Even the dreadful incident of her death, which occurred as she stood upright in the little parlour at Haworth, refusing to go to bed, but just leaning one hand upon the table, seems to me to be no unfit ending for a life so impatient of constraint from others, so implacable in its slavery to its own principles.

The poetry of Emily Brontë is small in extent and conventional in form. Its burning thoughts are concealed for the most part in the tame and ambling measures dedicated to female verse by the practice of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. That she was progressing to the last even in this matter of the form is shown by the little posthumous collection of her verses issued by Charlotte, consisting of early, and very weak pieces, and of two poems written in the last year of her life, which attain, for the first time, the majesty of rhythm demanded by such sublime emotions. But it is impossible not to regret that she missed that accomplishment in the art of poetry which gives an added force to the verse of her great French contemporary, Marceline Valmore, the only modern poetess who can fitly be compared with Emily Brontë for power of expressing passion in its simplicity.

In the 1846 volume there are but few of the contributions of Ellis Bell in which the form is adequate to the thought. Even "The Prisoner," certain lines of which have justly called forth Swinburne’s admiration, is on the whole a disjointed and halting composition. The moving and tear-compelling elegy called "A Death-Scene," in conception 1 of the most original and passionate poems in existence, is clothed in a measure that is like the livery of a charitable institution. This limitation of style does not interfere with the beauty of her 3 or 4 best poems, where indeed it does not exist, but it prevents the poetess in all but these superlative successes from attaining that harmony and directness of utterance which should characterise a song so unflinchingly sincere as hers.

It is difficult to praise Emily’s 3 or 4 greatest poems without an air of exaggeration. Finest among them all is that outburst of agnostic faith that was found by Charlotte on her desk when she died, a ‘last poem’ not to be surpassed in dignity and self-reliance by any in the language. "The Old Stoic" might have prepared us for the "Last Lines" by its concentrated force and passion. But the "chainless soul" of the author found its most characteristic utterance in the "Stanzas" which stand 2nd in our selection, the 2 last of which contain in its quintessence the peculiar gospel that it was the mission of Emily Brontë to preach. It was a message that brought no peace or happiness to the fiery soul that bore it. For her, in her own wonderful words,

  ‘intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.’

Under such a strain of being, no wonder that the pale and slender physical frame declined, and that our literature was deprived, at the age of twenty-nine, of an unrecognised, uncherished, undeveloped woman,

  ‘whose soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died.’

Recognition

4 of Brontë's poems ("My Lady's Grave", "Remembrance", "The Prisoner", and "Last Lines") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900.

Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë are commemorated by a memorial stone in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey, donated by the Brontë Society. The stone, carved from Huddlestone stone, was erected in 1939 and dedicated in 1947.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë). London: Aylott & Jones, 1846; Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1848.
• Poems of Emily Charlotte, and Anne Bronte, now for the first time printed. New York: Dodd Mead, 1902.
• Complete Poems (edited by Clement Shorter). New York & London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908.
• Complete Poems (edited by C. W. Hatfield). New York: Columbia University Press, 1941; London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
• Poems (edited by Derek Roper and Edward Chitham). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Novel

• Wuthering Heights: A novel (as "Ellis Bell"). (2 volumes), London: Newby, 1847; (1 volume), Boston: Coolidge & Wiley, 1848.

Non-fiction

• Five Essays Written in French by Emily Jane Brontë (translated by Lorine White Nagel, edited by Fannie E. Ratchford). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1948.

Letters

• The Brontë Letters (edited by Muriel Spark). London: Peter Nevill, 1954.

The Night-Wind. A poem by Emily Bronte. Performed by Frankie MacEachen

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

The Philosopher a poem written by Emily Brontë

Remembrance. A poem by Emily Bronte. Performed by Frankie MacEachen

• Walterclough Hall
• A Death-Scene – Poem published in 1846
• List of British poets

References

• This article incorporates public domain text from : Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, Dent; New York, Dutton.
• Emily Brontë, Charles Simpson
• In the Footsteps of the Brontës, Ellis Chadwick
• The Oxford Reader's Companion to the Brontës, Christine Alexander & Margaret Smith
• Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille
• The Brontë Myth, Lucasta Miller
• Emily, Daniel Wynne
• Dark Quartet, Lynne Reid Banks
• Emily Brontë, Winifred Gerin
• A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë, Katherine Frank
• Emily Brontë. Her Life and Work, Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford
• Emily's Ghost: A Novel of the Brontë Sisters, Denise Giardina
• Charlotte and Emily: A novel of the Brontës, Jude Morgan

External links

Poems

• "The Visionary"
• 2 poems by Bronte: "'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight," "Fall, Leaves, Fall"
• Brontë in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "My Lady's Grave", "Remembrance", "The Prisoner", "Last Lines"
• Brontë in The English Poets: An anthology: "Last Lines," " Stanzas," "Remembrance," "The Old Stoic," A Death-Scene"
• Emily Brontë 1818-1848 at the Poetry Foundation
• Brontë, Emily Jane (1818-1848) (5 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Emily Brontë in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: "Song," "The Old Stoic," "Warning and Reply," "Stanzas," "Her Last Lines"
• Emily Brontë in A Book of Women's Verse: "Remembrance," "The Visionary," "Fall Leaves, Fall," "The Prisoner," "Stanzs to —," "Often Rebuked," "Last Lines"
• Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell at Poets' Corner (website)
• Emily Jane Brontë at PoemHunter (73 poems)
• Emily Brontë at Poetry Nook (97 poems)
• Short biography and selected Poems

Audio / video

• Emily Brontë poems at YouTube

Books

• Works by Emily Brontë at Project Gutenberg
• Reader's Guide to Wuthering Heights
• Emily Bronte at Amazon.com

About

• Emily Brontë in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Emily Brontë at NNDB
• Emily Brontë 1818-1848) Short Biography
• Bronte Charlotte, Emily, and Anne in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Emily Bronte at the Victorian Web
• Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte at Poets' Corner (Westminster Abbey)
• Map of Locations associated with Wuthering Heights and Emily Brontë
• Emily Brontë at Find a Grave

Etc.

• Website of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth
• Emily Brontë's grave

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