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.
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...
Reception
Anne Brontë
An anonymous reviewer of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in The Spectator for 18 December 1847 commented that the work of all three Charlotte BrontëEmily BrontëBrontë
s suffered from injudicious selection of the theme and matter.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
218
Literary responses
Anne Brontë
The novel was reviewed immediately by The Spectator and the Athenæum. The former accused the author of a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal, and objected to the coarseness of...
CB
had begun creating plays with her siblings: both secret Bed plays produced under the covers with Emily
in their shared bed, and daytime plays involving Branwell
and Anne
as well.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
151
Reception
Charlotte Brontë
CB
travelled to London with her sister Anne
to refute the claim that Currer
, Ellis
, and Acton Bell
were a single author.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
557
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...
Wolff, Robert Lee. Sensational Victorian. Garland.
9
Arnold Bennett
gave it very high praise. Of the passage in which Lucy Audley decides to try to murder Robert, he...
Literary responses
Marjorie Bowen
Although MB
was commended for the accuracy of her historical settings in her crime novels, Mary Jean deMarr
points out that she was also faulted for unbelievable reversals and obstrusive symbolism. However, deMarr finds her...
Textual Features
Marjorie Bowen
Bowen argues that art pays everlasting tribute to the everlasting energy and aspiration of the human spirit, and every artist must increase the ethical content of the civilization in which he works.
Bowen, Marjorie. Ethics in Modern Art. Watts and Company.
19
She points...
Reception
Enid Blyton
On the other hand for the future free-speech activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali
, growing up as an Islamic Somali girl in 1980s Kenya, subjected to genital mutilation and pressured constantly to obey and submit...
Textual Production
Phyllis Bentley
PB
published her first of five critical texts about the lives and works of the threeBrontësisters
, The Brontës.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 191. Gale Research.
27
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...
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...
Textual Production
Phyllis Bentley
In 1949 PB
both arranged and introduced the six-volume Heather Edition of the Brontës' works, and supplied an introduction for an edition of Charlotte Brontë
's The Professor, which was published with poems and...
