In The Brontë Myth (2001), Lucasta Miller observes that unlike Charlotte, Emily seems ‘unwilling to share herself in death’.1 A striking statement on several levels, Miller’s claim offers not merely an observation of Emily’s character but a fabrication of it. Miller’s rhetorical strategy seems to construct a miserly figure whose silence amounts to selfishness and who sullenly ‘repels investigation’ even after death.2 The deficit of knowledge relating to Emily Brontë’s life means that much of it has been left to speculation and, as a result, portrayals of it and interpretations of her writing are invariably rendered suspect. It is precisely the allure of the unknown that has beckoned biographers, critics and scholars for centuries in their quest to answer what is, effectively, the unanswerable. The sparse remnants of a life bonded to anonymity are a frustrating reality, and the impulse to fill the space of the unknown means that mythic details often eclipse the limits and relative dullness of known history.
Emily Brontë is famous for being the enigmatic sister. At just twenty-nine years old she published what was to become one of the greatest and most puzzling classics of English literature: Wuthering Heights (1847). There is a plethora of questions relating to Emily Brontë’s life that continue to haunt and taunt us but perhaps the most frustrating of all is: how could a secluded, reclusive and relatively inexperienced woman from the remote industrial village of Haworth in the mid-nineteenth century write such a novel? Was it sheer creative genius? Was it the impact that Romantic and Gothic writers had on her imagination? Was the novel based on the Law Hill/Jack Sharp story that Sally Wainwright spotlights in her recent biopic To Walk Invisible (BBC, 2016)? Or is there something more to Emily’s life that we have yet to discover? Will missing pieces turn up somewhere in a musty old attic? Perhaps letters that have been missing for two hundred years … a journal or the missing Gondal manuscripts … a memoir written by a close acquaintance of the family … or the manuscript of the alleged second novel? These questions not only continue to intrigue Brontëphiles and scholars across the globe but also inflame the obsessive desire to know Emily.
As history shows, much of what we do know about her has come down through Charlotte’s biased and, to a great extent, illusory portrait of her sister. It was in fact in an effort to protect Emily from being maligned and misrepresented in the public’s imagination that Charlotte herself would engender ‘the Brontë myth’. The term refers to an accumulation of narratives that have developed through centuries’ worth of speculation about the Brontës’ lives with scarce evidence to support the claims. In the year following Emily’s death on 19 December 1848, Charlotte would thrice represent her sister to the world and, unwittingly, plant the first seeds of myth. As editor of the new 1850 Smith, Elder edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte included a ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, a new ‘Preface’ to Wuthering Heights, and ‘Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell’. In all three prologues, Charlotte depicts her sister to the public as a reclusive, unsociable and unworldly woman with an imagination wrought from the rugged and uncivilized environment in which she lived. Charlotte (mis)characterizes her elusive sister as an ignorant, ‘home-bred country girl’,3 ‘a nurseling of the moors’4 whose separation from her beloved homeland had once threatened her wellbeing.5 These romantic descriptions of Emily strongly underscore the associations we have come to make between her and the natural world. In all three representations of her sister, Charlotte paints a picture of a hardy, coarse and feral being akin to a character we might later find in a novel by Rudyard Kipling. In Lucasta Miller’s words, Charlotte ‘took on the role of Emily’s first mythographer’.6 ‘In interpreting her sister to the world’, Miller claims, Charlotte ‘would end up mystifying her more than she explained her’.7
It is a tragic fact that Emily did not live long enough to see the full impact her novel would have on the world. While Wuthering Heights is now considered a classic, early reviews were mixed. Some critics lauded the novel’s power and strangeness while others warned against its awful brutality. The novel was considered to have ‘considerable power’8 but was also ‘coarse and disagreeable’.9 Perhaps the most venomous view of all, however, came from a critic in 1848 who found it ‘a mystery’ how ‘a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters’.10 But to Charlotte, Wuthering Height’s ‘import and nature were misunderstood’.11 For Charlotte, it was Sydney Dobell, a writer for the Palladium, who first distinguished ‘the real nature’ of her sister’s novel in September 1850.12 Dobell recognized the creative genius at work in Wuthering Heights, declaring it ‘the unformed writing of a giant’s hand; the “large utterance” of a baby god’, a statement that would have undoubtedly soothed and enthused Charlotte.13
The sisters’ use of androgynous pseudonyms to disguise their sex flummoxed reviewers who sparred across newspapers and magazines in attempts to identify the sex of the three Bells. Many correctly assumed the authors of Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey must be women for the reason that both novels centralized the figure of the governess and treated her in a sympathetic light. Wuthering Heights, however, did not seem to bear the marks of a female pen. Hayley R. Mitchell finds that the general belief before Charlotte revealed the true identity of Ellis Bell was that ‘no woman could ever write such a shocking, masculine novel’.14 A critic for Union Magazine in 1848 asserted that ‘No woman could write Wuthering Heights’.15 One of Branwell Brontë’s early biographers, Alice Law, insisted Wuthering Heights had ‘an unmistakeable air of masculinity’.16 She maintained that ‘the whole conception of the story is, from start to finish, a man’s’.17 Drawing on the suppositions of earlier Branwell biographers such as Francis A. Leyland, Law contends that Branwell was most likely the author of Wuthering Heights. These early assessments and scepticisms demonstrate Emily’s rare ability as a writer and that intellect and creativity cannot be measured by a person’s sex or gender.
A novelist of the most prominent stature, Emily was also an accomplished poet. The celebrations of her bicentenary year in 2018 showed with painful clarity that while on an individual level responses to her poetry are reverential, she remains largely underrecognized as a poet in her own right. The fame of her novel continues to overshadow her poetry; so many of her poems provide stunning examples of an unbridled imagination and an uncommon intellect. She was, after all, a poet by nature and a novelist by necessity, and yet so few beyond the Brontë circle are even aware she wrote poetry at all. Laura Inman’s The Poetic World of Emily Brontë: Poems from the Author of Wuthering Heights (2014)18 is a timely volume that sheds important light onto Emily’s role as a poet and offers new insights into how her poetic mind helped create Wuthering Heights. Thankfully, this book demonstrates real promise that Emily’s role as a poet is finally being recognized on a much broader scale, a truth reinforced by some of the articles in this issue.
The Brontë Society’s 2018 conference ‘Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music’, on which this special issue of Brontë Studies is based, was held at the York Marriott 7–9 September 2018. It celebrated the life and works of Emily Brontë from many different angles and with a range of speakers. Keynote addresses were delivered by Professor Stevie Davies (Swansea University), Professor John Bowen (University of York) and Dr Hila Shachar (De Montfort University). Stevie Davies’s talk offered rich perspectives on the style and meaning of Emily’s poetry. John Bowen provided new insights into how we might view afresh space and landscape in Wuthering Heights. Hila Shachar turned to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by highlighting the diverse ways in which Emily Brontë has been presented on screen and how such representations contribute to her mythology.
The conference was also supplemented by after-dinner events. On the first evening, Claire O’Callaghan (Loughborough University) and Michael Stewart (University of Huddersfield) delighted us by exploring the contentious issue concerning Heathcliff’s ethnic origins. The discussion was framed around Michael Stewart’s novel Ill Will (2018) and Adam Low’s documentary A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights (2010). On the second evening, TV presenter and historian Kate Williams (University of Reading) regaled us with tales and trivia that recalled her experience as the Emily Brontë expert on the BBC’s Celebrity Mastermind.
Among many papers delivered over the three days, the conference included everything from insights into Emily’s possible love of Beethoven (John Hennessy) and the portrayal of domestic violence in Wuthering Heights (Sophie Franklin), to readings of Gondal as fan fiction (María Seijo-Richart) and mystical double vision in Wuthering Heights (Micael M. Clarke).
The articles that comprise this special issue are based on a selection of papers delivered at the conference, all of which offer a range of perspectives on Emily Brontë. They also engage with questions that continue to perplex our views on her life and writing. James Quinnell, Peter Cook and Simon Marsden take Emily’s poetry as their primary focus with Cook and Marsden considering the impact her poetic instinct had on Wuthering Heights. For each author, Emily’s poems bear the mark of a Romantic legacy. Quinnell discusses what he sees as dissonance in Emily’s poetry and argues that her poems evince a Wordsworthian longing to return to the past. For Cook, Emily marries a Romantic philosophy with nineteenth-century ideas about youth and age. Marsden offers a view of Emily’s poetry through the idea of the uncanny, specifically her employment of ghostly intrusions and the disruption of boundaries.
Offering an analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Edwin Marr draws direct comparisons between the play’s dramatic structure and Emily’s fashioning of violence and tragedy in Wuthering Heights. Emily Datskou’s article presents a queer reading of Wuthering Heights by examining how Emily Brontë seems to undermine notions of heteronormative temporality and in doing so challenges Victorian notions of family and sexual reproduction. Amber Regis’s article provides a close reading of Charlotte’s ‘Preface’ to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, arguing that Charlotte ‘others’ Wuthering Heights by likening it to something non-textual, a work of art that allows her to articulate her ambivalence towards her sister’s strange novel.
In addition, Claire O’Callaghan and Michael Stewart have recreated and expanded their discussion about Heathcliff’s race into a Q&A for this special issue. The final articles by Hila Shachar and Patsy Stoneman take as their focus the myths that have shaped our understanding of both Emily’s persona and the romantic associations that continue to impact perceptions of her novel. Shachar examines the depiction of Emily Brontë in Sally Wainwright’s biopic To Walk Invisible and also considers two screen adaptations of Wuthering Heights to underscore her point that biopics and adaptations both insist upon and compound the myths that construct Emily’s cultural persona. Connected thematically to this idea of onscreen myth-making is Patsy Stoneman’s article, which argues that the romantic associations the public has with Wuthering Heights are due in part to the novel’s narrative structure and technical strategies.
Overall the conference enjoyed an assortment of views ranging from the literary and biographical to the musical and cultural. It also signalled the direction that future research on Emily Brontë may take and where extant gaps may be filled. The articles in this issue expand upon existing scholarship and many look anew to where we might extend the exploration of the influences on Emily’s poetry and novel, how Emily’s cryptic fashioning of Heathcliff’s character compels us to consider her views on race and ethnicity, how the puzzles about her life continue to be a source of frustration for biographers and filmmakers and how such myths also influence adaptations of Wuthering Heights. It is difficult to predict where the future of Brontë studies lies with respect to Emily. I believe it is fair to say that her life will continue to puzzle scholars, critics, biographers and fans alike. Unless a major discovery is made about her life and/or her writing, the best we can (and should) do is continue to build upon the existing body of work by re-examining the past, offering new insights and embracing fresh voices as they emerge.
One of the most important things I learned from this conference was that Brontëphiles are a fellowship. Even those who met each other for the first time are implicitly aware that they are bonded in their mutual passion for the Brontës. I was fortunate to be a presenter at both the Charlotte and Emily bicentenary conferences. The 2016 conference ‘“the business of a woman’s life”: Charlotte Brontë and the Woman Question’ was a grand affair. It featured Germaine Greer and Claire Harman as keynotes. We were treated to a tour of Elizabeth Gaskell’s newly-opened house on Plymouth Grove and the most exquisite meals from the hotel’s French restaurant, all of which were enriched by the Edwardian grandeur of The Midland Hotel (Manchester) itself. The 2018 Emily Brontë conference was an equally enjoyable yet more intimate affair. I know from personal experience it has produced new and lasting friendships, created scholarly partnerships and helped form a network of colleagues who will, undoubtedly, shape the future of Brontë studies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the conference organizers for the painstaking time and effort they contributed to making the conference the success it was. Thanks especially to Rebecca Yorke, Diane Fare, Lauren Livesey and Linda Ling whose flawlessness made organizing a conference look so easy. I know what enormous energy this took and on behalf of all those who attended and participated, we thank you wholeheartedly for everything you did to make this a rewarding experience. And many thanks to all those who presented papers, chaired panels and were at the ready to help with last-minute and/or unexpected to-dos. I would also like to thank the contributors as well as the peer-reviewers and the Editor Amber Adams for their hard work in producing this issue.
Notes
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sarah E. Fanning
Sarah E. Fanning is a Lecturer in English and Director of Drama at Mount Allison University in Canada. Her research is broadly interdisciplinary, with a special focus on the Brontës, film and television, medical humanities, biography and crime. As well as publishing on the Brontës and literary adaptations, she is co-author with Claire O’Callaghan of an essay in the forthcoming collection Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Costume Dramas (Manchester University Press, 2020) about the presentation of Branwell Brontë in Sally Wainwright’s biopic To Walk Invisible (BBC, 2016). She is also co-editor with Claire O’Callaghan of a forthcoming edited collection, Serial Murder On Screen, examining media representations of real-life serial murder.
Notes
1 Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 170.
2 Miller, p. 170.
3 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Helen Small (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p. 308.
4 Brontë, p. 307.
5 ‘Selections from the Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell’ (1850), The Literature Network, <http://www.online-literature.com/brontea/poems-currer-ellis-acton/62/> [accessed 4 January 2020]
6 Miller, p. 174.
7 Miller, p. 187.
8 Examiner, 8 January 1848.
9 Spectator, 18 December 1847.
10 Graham’s Lady’s Magazine, July 1848.
11 Brontë, p. 303.
12 Brontë, p. 304.
13 Sydney Dobell, ‘Currer Bell’, The Palladium: A Monthly Journal (Edinburgh: James Hogg, September 1850), I, p. 166.
14 Hayley R. Mitchell, Readings on Wuthering Heights, The Literary Companion Series (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999), p. 21.
15 The Union Magazine, June 1848, p. 287.
16 Alice Law, Patrick Branwell Brontë (London: A. M. Philpot, Ltd., 1923), p. 156.
17 Law, p. 157.
18 Laura Inman, The Poetic World of Emily Brontë: Poems from the Author of Wuthering Heights (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014).