Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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 by Branwell, c. 1834" by Branwell Brontë,Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/The_Bront%C3%AB_Sisters_by_Patrick_Branwell_Bront%C3%AB_restored.jpg.
"Emily Brontë" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Emily_Brontë_by_Patrick_Branwell_Brontë_restored.jpg.
As a child SW
loved writing poems and stories, all entirely derivative from her reading of popular books like the Dr Who novelizations. In the sixth form at school she began to find the study...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
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.
Set against a backdrop of industrial intrigue and strikes, the plot turns on Katherine Healey's relationship with her brother, mill owner Wilfred Healey, her struggle against marriage to wealthy landowner Louis Kay, and her growing...
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
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, 1973.
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, 2000.
131ff
Intertextuality and Influence
Ann Bridge
At about twelve Mary Anne Sanders (later AB
) was meeting eminent scholars at dinner, because her businessman father, who had to leave the house early in the morning, insisted against convention on even his...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
SG
's characters are amusing caricatures of socialites, intellectuals, and rustics. Flora's city friend, the modern young widow Mrs Smiling, for instance, has a large collection of suitors and an even larger collection of brassières...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science Fiction and Mrs Brown opens with a long quotation in which Woolf
relates how she observed this shabby, immaculate old lady on a train from Richmond to London, and saw her as the character...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich
has offered this reading of ED
's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Gardam
Again the story centres on a girl growing up, though some attention is given too to her younger siblings, Sebastian and Phoebe (known from her pebble glasses as Beams). It is their father, the Reverend...
Intertextuality and Influence
A. S. Byatt
Charlotte Brontë
's poem We wove a web in childhood appears as epigraph, along with a sentence from Coleridge
about the serpent as emblem of the imagination.
Byatt, A. S. The Game. Chatto and Windus, 1967.
4
Both web and serpent are ominous. This...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Because of the extent to which ED
's concentrated and elusive verse, as well as her dissent from religious and social orthodoxies, seem to presage modernism, she has been considered the sole serious writer among...
Intertextuality and Influence
Daphne Du Maurier
She wrote this novel during the previous winter at her parents' country house, Ferryside at Bodinnick in Cornwall.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
While she worked at it, some lines from an Emily Brontë
poem (Self-Interrogation) came...
Literary responses
Laurence Alma-Tadema
Amy Levy
, who was deeply impressed by LAT
's appearance and presence, paid Love's Martyr a back-handed compliment: I think more of her book now that I have seen her.
qtd. in
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
