Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Brontë
-
Standard Name: Brontë, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Brontë
Pseudonym: Ellis Bell
Used Form: Emily Bronte
Used Form: Two
Emily Brontë
collaborated with her siblings on a body of juvenilia, and by herself wrote a small number of poems and a single surviving novel. Wuthering Heights is established as one of the most original and disturbing novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Its compelling imagery, sophisticated narrative technique, and powerful, indeed violent, story—part ghost story, part romance, part anatomy of social hierarchies and cultural conflict—details the enmity between two families on the Yorkshire moors that erupts when a strange child is adopted into one of them, and which is only resolved in the subsequent generation.
This novel received excellent reviews and in early 1920 reached the short-list of three English submissions for the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse, which however went in the end to Cicely Hamilton
. In The Observer...
Reception
Charlotte Maria Tucker
CMT
, whose works sold very well, was regarded as a major female author during the mid-Victorian period. She was incensed when in 1882 some one wrote a sketch of her life, and requested her...
Publishing
Anne Brontë
After AB
's death, Agnes Grey was reprinted with Wuthering Heights, some of the sisters
' poetry, and a biographical preface by Charlotte
, who considered this novel more suitable than The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
654-6
Brontë, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell; Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Wuthering Heights</span>; Extract from the Prefatory Note to ’Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell’”. Wuthering Heights, edited by Professor Ian Jack and Professor Ian Jack, Oxford University Press, pp. 359 - 65; 365.
365
Brontë, Anne, and Charles William Hatfield. The Complete Poems of Anne Brontë. Editor Shorter, Clement, Hodder and Stoughton.
ix
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
594
Publishing
Anne Brontë
The novel was accepted for publication by the London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby
along with Emily
's Wuthering Heights. The sisters had to underwrite the publication by paying £50, to be refunded if sales...
Publishing
Romer Wilson
RW
published a biography, All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Brontë, for which she had been commissioned the previous year.
Selincourt, Ernest De. “The Brontës: Review of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>All Alone</span> by Romer Wilson”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1376, p. 446.
446
Seymour-Smith, Martin, and Andrew C. Kimmens, editors. World Authors, 1900-1950. H. W. Wilson.
The Poems of Emily Brontë, CM
's article reclaiming the neglected poems of that great genius,
Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Editor Warner, Val, Carcanet and Virago.
356
was published in Temple Bar.
Mew, Charlotte. “Introduction”. Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Carcanet and Virago, p. ix - xxii.
viii
Publishing
Jessie Fothergill
A fan of the Brontë sisters, JF
published a glowing appraisal of Emily Brontë
's Wuthering Heights in the December 1887 edition of Temple Bar, participating in the late Victorian recuperation of Brontë's literary reputation.
Author summary
Phyllis Bentley
Phyllis Bentley
was a prolific and successful novelist, literary critic, short-story writer, children's writer, and journalist, who was productive over a broad span of the twentieth century. Almost all her twenty-eight novels and numerous short...
Author summary
A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR
's long career occupied the late decades of nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. It spanned two countries, England and France, and two languages, English and French. Robinson was generally...
Performance of text
Elizabeth Goudge
The first of EG
's plays to be professionally staged, TheBrontësofHaworth, opened at the Charta Theatre
in London.
“Elizabeth Goudge Books”. Anglophile Books: British women authors.
Weintraub, Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 10. Gale Research.
10: 133
Demastes, William W., and Katherine E. Kelly, editors. British Playwrights, 1880-1956. Greenwood Press.
100
Occupation
Sydney Thompson Dobell
While best remembered for writing spasmodic poetry, STD
also worked as a reviewer. In the Palladium and the Athenæum he gave positive reviews to works by Anne
, Emily
, and Charlotte Brontë
.
Mitchell, Sally, editor. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Garland Press.
Towards the close of the book, EG
declines to pronounce on her subject: I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Editor Shelston, Alan, Penguin.
526
Yet the book as a whole cannot help but pass...
Literary Setting
Kate Clanchy
Some stories concern painful and intractible moral and emotional dilemmas as they present themselves in ordinary life, like the inner defences automatically in place against believing that one's father has Alzheimer's. Several explore the relationship...
