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Abstract
In writing her ‘Editor’s Preface’ to Wuthering Heights in 1850, Charlotte Brontë reimagined Emily’s novel as a statue roughly hewn from ‘a granite block on a solitary moor’.1 The statue stands before us, wrought in words: an ekphrasis; a border-crossing between the arts, present here, in Brontë’s preface, as an attempt to render the visual and plastic in verbal form (and vice versa). The gesture is also multiply allusive, weaving together the language of Wuthering Heights, the judgement of literary critics, and ideas concerning poetry and permanence derived from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). This article performs an extended close reading of the novel-statue, exploring the rhetorical work it performs as part of Brontë’s careful negotiation of Emily’s posthumous print identity. As an editor, biographer and preface-writer, Brontë used the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights to transform Emily’s art: she inscribes a different legacy for her sister, reimagining the dead novelist as a poet yet to find her audience.
Notes
1 ‘Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights’, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (London: Smith, Elder, 1851; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. xix–xxiv (p. xxiv).
2 [Sydney Dobell], ‘Currer Bell’, Palladium, September 1850, 161–75 (p. 166).
3 The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Margaret Smith, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–2004), II (2000), 460.
4 Dobell, pp. 162, 170.
5 Letters, II, p. 461.
6 Letters, II, p. 480.
7 Dobell, p.174.
8 Letters, II, p. 460.
9 Letters, II, p. 463.
10 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3 (emphasis in the original).
11 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 151–81 (p. 152).
12 Letters, II, pp. 463, 466.
13 Letters, II, p. 479.
14 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1 (emphasis in the original).
15 Genette, p. 2.
16 Genette, pp. 197, 240 (emphasis in the original).
17 ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, by Currer Bell’, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (London: Smith, Elder, 1851; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. vii–xvi (pp. xii, xi).
18 ‘Biographical Notice’, p. xiv.
19 ‘Biographical Notice’, p. xv.
20 ‘Biographical Notice’, p. xvi.
21 ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. xix.
22 ‘Editor’s Preface’, pp. xx, xxi.
23 ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. xxiii.
24 ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. xxiv.
25 Letters, II, pp. 483, 484.
26 Heffernan, p. 4.
27 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 6, 5, 158.
28 Murray Krieger, ‘The Problem of Ekphrasis: Image and Words, Space and Time — and the Literary Work’, in Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, ed. by Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), pp. 3–20 (p. 6).
29 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 156.
30 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 157.
31 Dobell, p. 166.
32 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 155.
33 Krieger, p. 4.
34 ‘Editor’s Preface’, pp. xxi, xxiii.
35 Keats’s Endymion: A Romance was published in 1818 by Taylor and Hessey.
36 Bruce Haley, Living Forms: Romantics and The Monumental Figure (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 10.
37 Dobell, pp. 164, 167.
38 I am grateful to my colleague, Professor Angela Wright, for bringing this allusion to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to my attention. Note also that Radcliffe’s protagonist and Brontë’s novelist-statuary share a name, and that Radcliffe features in Shirley where Rose Yorke reads The Italian (1797).
39 Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ was first published in the Examiner on 11 January 1818. It was signed ‘Glirastes’.
40 Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Edward Chitham, ‘Emily Brontë and Shelley’, Brontë Society Transactions, 17.3 (1978), 189–96; Patsy Stoneman, ‘Catherine Earnshaw’s Journey to her Home Among the Dead: Fresh Thoughts on Wuthering Heights and “Epipsychidion”’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 47.188 (1996), 521–33; Michael O’Neill, ‘“Visions Rise, and Change”: Emily Brontë’s Poetry and Male Romantic Poetry’, Brontë Studies, 36.1 (2011), 57–63.
41 Krieger, p. 9.
42 Haley, pp. 196, 197.
43 ‘Biographical Notice’, p. viii.
44 Susan R. Bauman, ‘Her Sisters’ Keeper: Charlotte Brontë’s Defence of Emily and Anne’, Women’s Writing, 14.1 (2007), 23–48.
45 ‘Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell’, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (London: Smith, Elder, 1851; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 469–73 (p. 471).
46 Bauman, pp. 28, 28–29.
47 Letters, II, p. 526.
48 The subtitle of Genette’s study of paratexts.
49 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 414.
50 Bauman, p. 28.
51 Bauman has written extensively on Brontë’s editing of the poems in relation to her mythologizing of Emily and Anne, op cit. For further information on Brontë’s interventions and additions to Emily’s poetry in 1850, see also The Poems of Emily Brontë, ed. by Derek Roper with Edward Chitham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
52 Bauman, pp. 26, 25.
53 See Letters, II, p. 117 n. 2.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amber K. Regis
Amber K. Regis is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, U.K. She co-edited Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester University Press, 2017) with Deborah Wynne, and this volume contains her essays on Brontë portraiture and 1930s stage plays set in Haworth parsonage. Her current work includes co-editing The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts (with Deborah Wynne), and she is in the early stages of a new research project exploring Brontë paratexts and prefatory writings.