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.
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
Margaret Drabble
MD
's father, barrister John Frederick Drabble
, also attended Cambridge
, and served in the RAF
during the second world war. In 1945, newly demobbed, he stood as Labour
candidate for the Tory seat...
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
Family and Intimate relationships
Vernon Lee
The women's relationship began with (and was sustained by) their shared love of literature. Mary dedicated some poems in her A Handful of Honeysuckle to Violet, and regularly stayed with her in Italy, as...
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...
Health
Margiad Evans
As a child of about three she had terrible nightmares about people (nuns) who were running away from something, on fire and dying. She had dreadful dreams again at about seventeen, and then a recurrent...
Health
Storm Jameson
SJ
's demanding work, travel, and personal commitments exacted a serious toll on her health. She contracted diphtheria as a young woman, probably when she nursed her son through it. Frequently exhausted, she also had...
Health
Dora Carrington
Carrington attempted to give herself a miscarriage by riding a horse violently, and when this did not work she became depressed to a nearly suicidal degree.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893-1932. John Murray.
The contents of this book include some that have become central to the Carson canon, like The Glass Essay, a poem of love and desire, loss and rejection, whose speaker survives the end of...
Intertextuality and Influence
May Sinclair
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
Sarah Waters
SW
puts in puts in something like a regular work day when writing, but keeps going to all hours when re-writing. Despite her success, she still finds the process largely torture. And yet [s]tarting...
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
PB
was deeply influenced by the Brontës
, whose home at Haworth was close to where she herself grew up in Halifax. As a daydreaming child she strongly identified with the Brontës
' imaginary worlds...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jeni Couzyn
Of the three poems in the final section, The Tarantula Dance takes up many of the volume's most disturbing images. It describes a catastrophic male-female relationship. The woman begins with a black aura, suffering...
Intertextuality and Influence
Isabella Ormston Ford
The novel quotes as epigraph the stanza in which Emily Brontë
says that her only prayer is a prayer for liberty. It opens in scorching early summer in Portman Square, London, in the town...
