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.
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
Textual Production
Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant's contribution was The Sisters BrontëEmily BrontëAnne Brontë, a sharply perceived and proto-feminist analysis.
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
343
Reception
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Remembered mostly for her prose contributions to the early feminist movement, BRP
also produced poetic creations which deserve not to be dismissed. (Her daughter credits her with admiring the poetry of Percy Shelley
and more...
Education
Jean Plaidy
Eleanor Alice Burford (later JP
) learned how to read at four years old: I do feel that books were my thing, right from the word go, she told an interviewer in 1991.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
She...
Textual Production
Jean Plaidy
JP
had begun writing some years before this first publication.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
During the 1930s she produced nine long novels, in which she tried to emulate her literary heroes (theBrontësEmily Brontë
, George Eliot
,...
Reception
Jean Plaidy
In 1991, JP
said of Mistress of Mellyn: This was the sort of book that I loved to write, because I had read so much of the BrontësCharlotte BrontëAnne Brontë
, over and over again, and...
Education
Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR
imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
AMFR
published her one-volume biography Emily Brontë as one of the Eminent Women series.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Reception
A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR
, who had published a successful biography of Emily Brontë
, was the only woman elected as one of eleven vice-presidents heading the newly formed Brontë Society
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
A. Mary F. Robinson
It was her first of several writings on literary subjects for this periodical, most of them published in the early twentieth century. Her other contributions were French translations of earlier works, including a three-part discussion...
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...
