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.
"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.
Some stories concern painful and intractible moral and emotional dilemmas as they present themselves in ordinary life, like the inner defences automatically in place against believing that one's father has Alzheimer's. Several explore the relationship...
Literary Setting
Elizabeth Gaskell
Towards the close of the book, EG
declines to pronounce on her subject: I cannot measure or judge of such a character as hers.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Editor Shelston, Alan, Penguin, 1975.
526
Yet the book as a whole cannot help but pass...
Literary Setting
Olive Schreiner
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...
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press, 1994.
183
Occupation
Sydney Thompson Dobell
While best remembered for writing spasmodic poetry, STD
also worked as a reviewer. In the Palladium and the Athenæum he gave positive reviews to works by Anne
, Emily
, and Charlotte Brontë
.
Mitchell, Sally, editor. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Garland Press, 1988.
Weintraub, Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 10. Gale Research, 1982.
10: 133
Demastes, William W., and Katherine E. Kelly, editors. British Playwrights, 1880-1956. Greenwood Press, 1996.
100
Performance of text
Elizabeth Goudge
The first of EG
's plays to be professionally staged, TheBrontësofHaworth, opened at the Charta Theatre
in London.
“Elizabeth Goudge Books”. Anglophile Books: British women authors.
Author summary
Phyllis Bentley
Phyllis Bentley
was a prolific and successful novelist, literary critic, short-story writer, children's writer, and journalist, who was productive over a broad span of the twentieth century. Almost all her twenty-eight novels and numerous short...
Author summary
A. Mary F. Robinson
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...
Publishing
Charlotte Mew
The Poems of Emily Brontë, CM
's article reclaiming the neglected poems of that great genius,
Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Editor Warner, Val, Carcanet and Virago, 1981.
356
was published in Temple Bar.
Mew, Charlotte. “Introduction”. Collected Poems and Prose, edited by Val Warner, Carcanet and Virago, 1981, p. ix - xxii.
viii
Publishing
Romer Wilson
RW
published a biography, All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Brontë, for which she had been commissioned the previous year.
Selincourt, Ernest De. “The Brontës: Review of All Alone by Romer Wilson”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1376, 15 June 1928, p. 446.
446
Seymour-Smith, Martin, and Andrew C. Kimmens, editors. World Authors, 1900-1950. H. W. Wilson, 1996.
The novel was accepted for publication by the London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby
along with Emily
's Wuthering Heights. The sisters had to underwrite the publication by paying £50, to be refunded if sales...
Publishing
Jessie Fothergill
A fan of the Brontë sisters, JF
published a glowing appraisal of Emily Brontë
's Wuthering Heights in the December 1887 edition of Temple Bar, participating in the late Victorian recuperation of Brontë's literary reputation.
Publishing
Anne Brontë
After AB
's death, Agnes Grey was reprinted with Wuthering Heights, some of the sisters
' poetry, and a biographical preface by Charlotte
, who considered this novel more suitable than The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press, 1994.
654-6
Brontë, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell; Editors Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights; 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.
365
Brontë, Anne, and Charles William Hatfield. The Complete Poems of Anne Brontë. Editor Shorter, Clement, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921.
ix
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press, 1994.
594
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.
