Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Emily Brontë
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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 exemplifies the double-edged nature of MW
's reputation. On the one hand she has become almost synonymous in the public mind with the genre she made famous: the romantic, earthy, rural novel. Her early...
Literary responses
Hannah Lynch
Blackwood's Magazine introduced the serialization of this book with a half-promise of its being a clef: It is, we believe, the faithful narrative of an actual experience, the work of a powerful writer whose identity...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jeni Couzyn
Of the three poems in the final section, The Tarantula Dance takes up many of the volume's most disturbing images. It describes a catastrophic male-female relationship. The woman begins with a black aura, suffering...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Ormston Ford
The novel quotes as epigraph the stanza in which Emily Brontë
says that her only prayer is a prayer for liberty. It opens in scorching early summer in Portman Square, London, in the town...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jessie Fothergill
Set against a backdrop of industrial intrigue and strikes, the plot turns on Katherine Healey's relationship with her brother, mill owner Wilfred Healey, her struggle against marriage to wealthy landowner Louis Kay, and her growing...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. B. C. Jones
The book positions itself in relation to cultural, social and emotional markers that are not those of a majority in later times. Helen and Felicia read Northanger Abbey aloud, and Helen admits it to be...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Bridge
At about twelve Mary Anne Sanders (later AB
) was meeting eminent scholars at dinner, because her businessman father, who had to leave the house early in the morning, insisted against convention on even his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edith Mary Moore
The title-page quotes from Shakespeare
(What's past is Prologue) and Cicero
(That cannot be said too often which is not yet understood).
Moore, Edith Mary. The Defeat of Woman. C.W. Daniel Co.
Again the story centres on a girl growing up, though some attention is given too to her younger siblings, Sebastian and Phoebe (known from her pebble glasses as Beams). It is their father, the Reverend...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
The title of this novel comes from O'Brien's four-line epigraph from Emily Brontë
, where the phrase rhymes with Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers.
O’Brien, Edna. Wild Decembers. Houghton Mifflin.
prelims
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich
has offered this reading of ED
's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. S. Byatt
Charlotte Brontë
's poem We wove a web in childhood appears as epigraph, along with a sentence from Coleridge
about the serpent as emblem of the imagination.
Byatt, A. S. The Game. Chatto and Windus.
4
Both web and serpent are ominous. This...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Because of the extent to which ED
's concentrated and elusive verse, as well as her dissent from religious and social orthodoxies, seem to presage modernism, she has been considered the sole serious writer among...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
SG
's characters are amusing caricatures of socialites, intellectuals, and rustics. Flora's city friend, the modern young widow Mrs Smiling, for instance, has a large collection of suitors and an even larger collection of brassières...
