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.
Cherry Clayton
believes the novel's fictional English setting, Greenwood, was influenced by the English landscapes in the works of Hardy
, George Eliot
, and the BrontësEmily BrontëAnne Brontë
. Schreiner herself had not yet been to...
Reception
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dora Sigerson
She had met him through Katharine Tynan, and they became engaged in September 1895 after a long courtship. Their loving marriage lasted the rest of Dora's life. They never had children.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Shorter worked for...
Textual Production
Dora Sigerson
DS
's last publication, eight years after her death, was Ernest Benn
's printing of twenty-one of her poems as a pamphlet in its Augustan Books of Poetry series.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Other poets in this series included...
Textual Production
May Sinclair
The first of MS
's introductions to the Everyman's Library reprints of the BrontëAnne BrontëEmily Brontë
sisters' novels, the one to Wuthering Heights, was published.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
213
Textual Production
May Sinclair
MS
published The Three Brontës, a critical and interpretive essay assessing Charlotte
, Anne
, and Emily
as people and as artists.
MS
's The Three Sisters appeared: a psychological/psychoanalytical novel which, although the sisters in question are not the BrontësEmily BrontëAnne Brontë
, seems to take its setting from that of their lives.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
108, 225-6
Intertextuality and Influence
May Sinclair
It is a ghost-story in which an archivist visiting a lonely house in Yorkshire sees an apparition of a non-existent crying child, in the manner of a famous episode in Emily Brontë
's Wuthering Heights.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
131ff
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
MS
edited and published A Selection of Poems by Emily Brontë, with an introduction, for the Crown Classics Series published by Grey Walls Press
.
Though this was the official publication date, the British Library
Textual Production
Muriel Spark
MS
and Derek Stanford
published their joint study Emily Brontë
: Her Life and Work, after she had had to wait for his part of the venture, which came in late.
The actual text...
Textual Features
Muriel Spark
This novel, another treatment of suffering which looks back to the book of Job,
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
514
begins when a film director, Tom Richards, falls from a crane on a film set and is taken to...
Textual Features
Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS
later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
Friends, Associates
Mary Taylor
Mary's descriptions of life abroad provided Charlotte Brontë
with what she described as a wish for wings,
Taylor, Mary. Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Brontë: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere. Editor Stevens, Joan, Auckland University Press; Oxford University Press.
22
and MT
successfully urged her and her sister Emily
to pursue their studies in Brussels; they...
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...
