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Title: Emily Brontë
Author: A. Mary F. Robinson
Release date: June 14, 2008 [eBook #25789]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25789
Credits: E-text prepared by Delphine Lettau and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EMILY BRONTË ***
E-text prepared by Delphine Lettau and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Eminent Women Series
Edited by John H. Ingram
EMILY BRONTE
All Rights Reserved.
EMILY BRONTE
by
A. MARY F. ROBINSON
Second Edition.
London:
W. H. Allen and Co.
13, Waterloo Place
1883.
[All Rights Reserved]
London:
Printed by W. H. Allen and Co., 13 Waterloo Place. S.W.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Introduction 1
CHAPTER I.
Parentage 8
CHAPTER II.
Babyhood 18
CHAPTER III.
Cowan's Bridge 28
CHAPTER IV.
Childhood 40
CHAPTER V.
Going to School 53
CHAPTER VI.
Girlhood at Haworth 61
CHAPTER VII.
In the Rue d'Isabelle 77
CHAPTER VIII.
A Retrospect 92
CHAPTER IX.
The Recall 103
CHAPTER X.
The Prospectuses 111
CHAPTER XI.
Branwell's Fall 116
CHAPTER XII.
Writing Poetry 128
CHAPTER XIII.
Troubles 144
CHAPTER XIV.
Wuthering Heights: its Origin 154
CHAPTER XV.
Wuthering Heights: the Story 168
CHAPTER XVI.
'Shirley' 209
CHAPTER XVII.
Branwell's End 217
CHAPTER XVIII.
Emily's Death 223
FINIS! 233
* * * * *
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
1846-56. The Works of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
1857. Life of Charlotte Bronte. _Mrs. Gaskell. 1st and 2nd Editions._
1877. Charlotte Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._
1877. Note on Charlotte Bronte. _A. C. Swinburne._
1881. Three Great Englishwomen. _P. Bayne._
MS. Lecture on Emily Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._
MS. Notes on Emily and Charlotte Bronte. _Miss Ellen Nussey._
MS. Letters of Charlotte and Branwell Bronte.
1879. Reminiscences of the Brontes. _Miss E. Nussey._
1870. Unpublished Letters of Charlotte, Emily,
and Anne Bronte. _Hours at Home._
1846. Emily Bronte's Annotated Copy of her Poems.
1872. Branwell Bronte: in the "Mirror." _G. S. Phillips._
1879. Pictures of the Past. _F. H. Grundy._
1830. Prospectus of the Clergymen's Daughters' School
at Cowan's Bridge.
1850. Preface to Wuthering Heights. _Charlotte Bronte._
1850. Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell. _Charlotte Bronte._
1850. Wuthering Heights: in the "Palladium." _Sydney Dobell._
Personal Reminiscences of Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ratcliffe, Mrs. Brown,
and Mr. William Wood, of Haworth.
1811-18. Poems of Patrick Bronte, B.A., Incumbent of Haworth.
1879. Haworth: Past and Present. _J. Horsfall Turner._
* * * * *
EMILY BRONTE.
INTRODUCTION.
There are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular
verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. So
much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the
despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to
form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments
reach us of Elizabethan praises; and we cannot help recalling the number
of copies of 'Prometheus Unbound' sold in the lifetime of the poet. We
know too well "what porridge had John Keats," and remember with
misgiving the turtle to which we treated Hobbs and Nobbs at dinner, and
how complacently we watched them put on their laurels afterwards.
Let us, then, by all means distrust our own and the public estimation of
all heroes dead within a hundred years. Let us, in laying claim to an
infallible verdict, remember how oddly our decisions sound at the other
side of Time's whispering gallery. Shall we therefore pronounce only on
Chaucer and Shakespeare, on Gower and our learned Ben? Alas! we are too
sure of their relative merits; we stake our reputations with no qualms,
no battle-ardours. These we reserve to them for whom the future is not
yet secure, for whom a timely word may still be spoken, for whom we yet
may feel that lancing out of enthusiasm only possible when the cast of
fate is still unknown, and, as we fight, we fancy that the glory of our
hero is in our hands.
But very gradually the victory is gained. A taste is unconsciously
formed for the qualities necessary to the next development of
art--qualities which Blake in his garret, Millet without the sou, set
down in immortal work. At last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur
sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons
his discovery. Mr. Swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from 'Wuthering
Heights'; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where Coleridge
and Webster, Hofmann and Leopardi have their place. Until then, a few
brave lines of welcome from Sydney Dobell, one fine verse of Mr.
Arnold's, one notice from Mr. Reid, was all the praise that had been
given to the book by those in authority. Here and there a mill-girl in
the West Riding factories read and re-read the tattered copy from the
lending library; here and there some eager, unsatisfied, passionate
child came upon the book and loved it, in spite of chiding, finding in
it an imagination that satisfied, and a storm that cleared the air; or
some strong-fibred heart felt without a shudder the justice of that
stern vision of inevitable, inherited ruin following the chance-found
child of foreign sailor and seaport mother. But these readers were not
many; even yet the book is not popular.
For, in truth, the qualities that distinguish Emily Bronte are not those
which are of the first necessity to a novelist. She is without
experience; her range of character is narrow and local; she has no
atmosphere of broad humanity like George Eliot; she has not Jane
Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked
in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the
never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for Charlotte
Bronte a place between Cervantes and Victor Hugo.
Emily Bronte is of a different class. Her imagination is narrower, but
more intense; she sees less, but what she sees is absolutely present: no
writer has described the moors, the wind, the skies, with her passionate
fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow
fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and
personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'Villette' and
'Shirley'; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and
exacting taskmaster; but, on the other Next |