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.
CB
had begun creating plays with her siblings: both secret Bed plays produced under the covers with Emily
in their shared bed, and daytime plays involving Branwell
and Anne
as well.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
151
Reception
Charlotte Brontë
CB
travelled to London with her sister Anne
to refute the claim that Currer
, Ellis
, and Acton Bell
were a single author.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
557
Textual Production
Charlotte Brontë
Emily
, Anne
, and CB
published a collection, Poems, under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
The pseudonym of Currer Bell may have been based on the name of Miss Currer
of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Charlotte Brontë
The novel focuses on the Luddite riots in Yorkshire in the Napoleonic era. Shirley Keeldar, an heiress with a man's name who revels in her unconventionality (and who was, according to conversation Elizabeth Gaskell
had...
Textual Production
Anne Brontë
Anne
and Emily
Brontë's first novels, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights respectively, were published together in three volumes.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
539
Literary responses
Anne Brontë
A review of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in the Athenæum characterized the work of the Emily BrontëBrontës
in terms of painful and exceptional subjects:—the misdeeds and oppressions of tyranny—the eccentricities of woman's fantasy
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
218
and...
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
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Brontë
AB
's elder sisters were Maria
(born in 1814), Elizabeth
, (1815), Charlotte
, (1816), and Emily
(1818).
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
59, 61, 71, 78
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Brontë
The close of the year 1848 was terrible for AB
. Her sister Emily
died of consumption on 19 December, as had Branwell
in September.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
576
Textual Production
Anne Brontë
Although some of the collaboratively produced juvenilia of the Brontë children is still extant, none has survived that was individually authored by AB
.
Chitham, Edward. A Life of Anne Brontë. B. Blackwell.
5
In their childhood play which developed into the fantasy worlds...
Family and Intimate relationships
Emma Frances Brooke
It appears that EFB
had at least two sisters, and that they may have both been writers. An article written after EFB revealed her authorship of A Superfluous Woman quotes her still undiscovered biographer: There...
Textual Production
Emma Frances Brooke
It seems that EFB
began writing seriously for financial reasons after her sudden loss of fortune and her move south to Hampstead in London in 1879.
Edwards, Joseph, editor. The First Labour Annual 1895: A Year Book of Industrial Progress and Social Welfare. No. 1, The Harvester Press.
163
Daniels, Kay. “Emma Brooke: Fabian, feminist and writer”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
12
, No. 2, pp. 153-68.
156-7
She officially adopted authorship as her profession...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Carrington
Their friendship was at first somewhat shaky, but warmed considerably. Writing in her diary on 6 June 1918, Woolf described DC
as such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same...
