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.
On 4 July 1846 two anonymous reviews of Poems by Currer
, Ellis
and Acton Bell
appeared, one mildly positive by Sydney Dobell
in the Athenæum, and one enthusiastic in the Critic. A...
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...
Literary responses
Mary Webb
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
Anne Brontë
The novel was reviewed immediately by The Spectator and the Athenæum. The former accused the author of a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal, and objected to the coarseness of...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Inchbald
A Simple Story was praised by no less a modern authority than Q. D. Leavis
,
and received a more recent accolade from Terry Castle
as the most elegant English fiction...
Literary responses
Romer Wilson
The Times Literary Supplement reviewed this novel harshly. It judged the story fairly dull and pointless, and took issue with Jill's girlish narrative tone: Miss Wilson's slangy unsophistication is not simplicity; it is merely an...
Literary responses
Marjorie Bowen
Although MB
was commended for the accuracy of her historical settings in her crime novels, Mary Jean deMarr
points out that she was also faulted for unbelievable reversals and obstrusive symbolism. However, deMarr finds her...
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
9
Arnold Bennett
gave it very high praise. Of the passage in which Lucy Audley decides to try to murder Robert, he...
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
George Moore
and Hugh Walpole
both praised Heritage before publication; Walpole discerned the influence of Joseph Conrad
and Emily Brontë
.Again VSW
's mother
weighed in as self-appointed publicist, and her husband
envisaged for her...
Literary responses
Emma Tennant
A hatchet job of a short notice in The Guardian identified this as a pseudo-scholarly appendix to Emily
's Wuthering Heights, a parody of the Brontë industry, but as finally an example of liana...
Literary responses
Margaret Kennedy
Reviewers have likened Kennedy to Jane Austen
, one of her literary role models. In a review for the New York World, Beverley Nichols
stated that she would be a robust Jane Austen,...
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.
Wisker, Alistair et al. “Introduction: A Literary Appreciation”. Doreen Wallace, 1897-1989: Writer and Social Campaigner, Edwin Mellen Press, p. xvii - xxi.
xviii
Literary responses
Elizabeth Gaskell
The Athenæum and others were positive about Gaskell's biography, although an anonymous review by E. S. Dallas
in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine suggested that the biographer had completely misread Emily Brontë
's reserve as evidence of...