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.
Charlotte Brontë painted with her sisters Emily and Anne by their brother Branwell, c. 1834 (said by Elizabeth Gaskell to have captured excellent likenesses despite its lack of artistic skill). National Portrait Gallery.
Painting of Emily Brontë in a green dress with large collar, cropped from the group portrait by her brother Branwell, c. 1834, of all three sisters (and of himself, painted over). The picture was long lost to view, and has crease marks from being folded. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Eva Figes
Though she mentions such writers as Eliza Haywood and Mary Davys , she begins her detailed discussion with the 1790s (a time which twenty years on would be regarded as somewhat late in the history...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Virginia Woolf
The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection.
McNeillie, Andrew, and Virginia Woolf. “Introduction”. The Common Reader, Annotated Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. ix - xv.
x
Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Alice Meynell
Many of the essays reprinted here focus on women writers who were, to put it mildly, little known to the public in the 1940s. These included: Anna Seward and Joanna Baillie , as well as...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Kennedy
Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Marghanita Laski
ML defines ecstasy as experiences that are joyful, transitory, unexpected, rare, valued, and extraordinary to the point of often seeming as if derived from a praeternatural source.
Laski, Marghanita. Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences. Cresset Press.
5
An ecstatic state is one in which...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Q. D. Leavis
Responding to recent charges that Brontë 's novel is stylistically flawed, incoherent in intention, and excessively melodramatic and violent, QDL argues that the text, although not a seamless work of art, belongs, along with Tolstoy
Textual Production Helen Dunmore
HD 's many other writings include reviews (of both poetry and fiction), introductions (to the poems of Emily Brontë , the stories of D. H. Lawrence and F. Scott Fitzgerald , and a study of...
Textual Production Rumer Godden
Years before, Rumer had hoped they might be the new Brontësisters .
Chisholm, Anne. Rumer Godden, A Storyteller’s Life. Pan Books.
158
They felt they knew India better than most adult Anglo-Indians.
Textual Production Anne Brontë
Charlotte , Emily , and Anne published a collection, Poems, under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Bell was the middle name of their father's curate.
Gérin, Winifred. Emily Brontë: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
185
They received their first copies on...
Textual Production Phyllis Bentley
PB published her first of five critical texts about the lives and works of the threeBrontësisters , The Brontës.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
TLS Archive (19 July 1947): 362
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 191. Gale Research.
27
Textual Production Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW was by this time establishing a name for herself as an poet. In 1890 Elizabeth A. Sharp included three of her poems in Women Poets of the Victorian Era. The anthology also features...
Textual Production Margiad Evans
At the end of the 1940s, when she was writing extremely hard, she began work on a book about Emily Brontë . She abandoned it soon after her first epileptic seizure, feeling that it was...
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

Timeline

14 September 1767: Midwife Elizabeth Brownrigg was hanged at...

Building item

14 September 1767

Midwife Elizabeth Brownrigg was hanged at Tyburn (in London near the present Marble Arch) for the murder of Mary Clifford , a workhouse apprentice.

1840: Thomas Cautley Newby established himself...

Writing climate item

1840

Thomas Cautley Newby established himself as a publisher in London; he earned notoriety for failing to honour contracts, especially with new writers.

1880: Sabine Baring-Gould's novel Mehalah, published...

Writing climate item

1880

Sabine Baring-Gould 's novelMehalah, published this year, was compared by Swinburne to Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights.

April 1972: Daffodils in Ice, first of three volumes...

Women writers item

April 1972

Daffodils in Ice, first of three volumes of poetry by Sister Mary Agnes , was published with a foreword by novelist Elizabeth Goudge .

10 September 2003: Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of...

Writing climate item

10 September 2003

Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.

December 2004: An early nineteenth-century flintlock box-lock...

Building item

December 2004

An early nineteenth-century flintlock box-lock pocket pistol . . . with a spring bayonet below the barrel, once owned by the Rev. Patrick Brontë fetched £24,000 at auction.

Texts

Brontë, Emily. A Selection of Poems by Emily Brontë. Editor Spark, Muriel, Grey Walls Press, 1952.
Brontë, Anne, and Emily Brontë. Agnes Grey. T. C. Newby, 1847.
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, 1981, pp. 359 - 65; 365.
Sinclair, May, and Emily Brontë. “Introduction”. Wuthering Heights, Dent; Dutton, 1907.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, edited by Charles William Hatfield, Columbia University Press, 1941, pp. 3-13.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. Gondal’s Queen, edited by Fannie E. Ratchford, University of Texas Press, 1955, pp. 11-38.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. The Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Barbara Lloyd-Evans, Batsford, 1992, pp. 7-13.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. The Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Derek Roper, Clarendon, 1995, pp. 1-29.
Brontë, Charlotte et al. Poems. Aylott and Jones, 1846.
Brontë, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë. Editor Hatfield, Charles William, Columbia University Press, 1941.
Brontë, Emily. The Poems of Emily Brontë. Editors Roper, Derek and Edward Chitham, Clarendon, 1995.
Brontë, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Wuthering Heights. T. C. Newby, 1847.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Editor Jack, Professor Ian, Oxford University Press, 1981.
Brontë, Emily et al. Wuthering Heights; and, Agnes Grey. Smith, Elder, 1850.