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Abstract
A significant number of Emily Brontë’s poems explore the contrasting states of youth and age. In most of them Brontë creates a dialogue between personae representing the two states, and calls into question traditional moral values by examining the relationship between her personae and the natural world. Her conclusions and ways of working in these poems, and in Wuthering Heights, formed a seminal conduit between the ideas of Romantic writers and the mid-nineteenth century, and at the same time achieved a radical reworking of these ideas and values for her own time and place.
Notes
Notes
1 The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse, ed. by David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968).
2 See for example Helen Brown, ‘The Influence of Byron on Emily Brontë’, Modern Language Review, 34.3 (1939), 374–81; Dorothy J. Cooper, ‘The Romantics and Emily Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions, 12:2 (1952), 106–12; Cecil Day Lewis, ‘The Poetry of Emily Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions, 13.2 (1957), 83–99.
3 Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë: a Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 153.
4 Steve Vine, ‘Romantic Ghosts: The Refusal of Mourning in Emily Brontë’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry, 37.1 (Spring, 1999), 99–117 (p. 116).
5 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, second edition 1997. First published 1973), p. 69.
6 Emily Brontë: The Complete Poems, ed. by Janet Gezari (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), poem no. 154, pp. 170–71, ll. 1–38. Hereafter cited as ‘Gezari’, with her numbering of the poems and a page reference.
7 Gezari, 154, ll. 41–44: p. 171.
8 Thomas J. Joudrey, ‘“Well, We Must Be for Ourselves in the Long Run”: Selfishness and Sociality in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 70.2 (2015), 165–93 (p. 168).
9 Gezari, iii [157], ll.11–12: pp. 7–8.
10 Gezari, iii [157], ll. 3–5: pp. 7–8.
11 Gezari, i [153], ll. 18–22, 36–52, 63–70: pp. 3–5.
12 Andrew Bell, An Experiment in Education, Made at the Male Asylum of Madras. Suggesting a System by which a school or Family may teach itself under the Superintendance of the Master or Parent (London: Cadell and Davies/Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1797).
13 Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education, as it respects the industrious classes of the community: containing a short account of its present state, hints towards its improvement, and a detail of some practical experiments conducive to that end (London: Darton and Harvey, J. Mathews, and W. Hatchard, 1803).
14 Gezari, p. 231.
15 William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, ll. 64–65, 71–76: Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 460.
16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ll. 54–63: The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 volumes (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), Vol. I, p. 242.
17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Christabel’, ll. 656–61: Coleridge, Vol. I, p. 235.
18 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, ll. 144–46, 166–75: Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 193.
19 See Hutchinson, Shelley, p. 31.
20 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, II. 856–58, 946–47: Hutchinson, Shelley, pp. 58, 60.
21 See William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, facsimile with Introduction and Commentary by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), Plate 46.
22 Patsy Stoneman, ‘Addresses from the land of the dead’: Emily Brontë and Shelley, Brontë Studies, 31:2 (July 2006), 121–131 (p. 121).
23 Gezari, 165, ll. 9–12: p. 177. This poem was published in 1850, with additions by Charlotte Brontë, as ‘The Visionary’: see Gezari’s note, pp. 283–4.
24 Gezari, 44, ll. 6–7: p. 66.
25 Gezari, 162, ll. 15–16, 37, 49–52, 57–60: pp. 173–75.
26 Gezari, 46, ll.11–12: p. 67.
27 Gezari, 119, ll. 2, 6, 9–12: p. 127.
28 Gezari, 47, ll. 1–4: p. 68.
29 Gezari, 108, ll. 28–32: p. 119.
30 Gezari, 45, p. 67.
31 Gezari, 93, ll. 2, 4, 26: p. 107–08.
32 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ed. by Sir Geoffrey Keynes (London and New York: Oxford University Press, in association with the Trianon Press, Paris, 1975) Plate 3.
33 Bloom, p. 69.
34 Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights, ed. by Pauline Nestor (London: Penguin Books, 2003. First published 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell), Volume I, Chapter 1, p. 3. Hereafter cited as WH, with volume, chapter and page numbers.
35 WH, I, II, p. 9.
36 WH, I, I, p. 8.
37 WH, I, IX, p. 82.
38 WH, I, I, p. 3; I, II, p. 12.
39 WH, I, IV, p. 38.
40 WH, I, II, p. 15
41 WH, I, V, p. 42.
42 WH, I, IV, p. 39.
43 Gezari, 83, ll. 15–18: p. 97.
44 Gezari loc. cit., ll. 10, 33–34, 51, 53–4
45 WH, I, V, p. 43.
46 WH, I, VI, p. 46.
47 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805) ll.436–37, 442–44: William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Text of 1805), ed. by Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 79.
48 WH, I, VI, pp. 46–47.
49 WH, II, XIX, p. 324.
50 WH, I, XII, pp. 125–26.
51 WH, II, XIX, p. 322.
52 WH, II, XIX, p. 322.
53 Gezari, 123, ll. 19, 17, 3–4: p. 131.
54 WH, I, XIV, p. 148.
55 WH, I, III, p. 29.
56 WH, I, IX, p. 81.
57 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 134.
58 WH, I, VII, p. 54.
59 Ted Hughes, Wodwo (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 9. Interestingly, both writers evoked an ‘iron man’ in their work, Hughes an ‘iron woman’ as well.
60 ‘The Poems of Emily Brontë, introduced by Charlotte Mew (1904)’, University of Middlesex: <http://studymore.org.uk/xmeweb.htm> [accessed 13 July 2019].
61 Charles Morgan, ‘Emily Brontë’, in Reflections in a Mirror (London: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 130–46 (p. 140). Morgan’s essay first appeared in The Great Victorians, ed. by H. J. Massingham and Hugh Massingham (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1932), pp. 63–79.
62 Cecil Day Lewis, (1957) ‘The Poetry of Emily Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions, 13 (1957), 83–99 (p. 90).
63 Thomas Stearns Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 13–22, (p. 15).
64 Bloom, p. 96.
65 Quoted in Bloom, p. 69.
66 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book VII, ll. 479–80: William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, p. 253.
67 Nick Holland, Emily Brontë: a Life in 20 Poems (Stroud: The History Press, 2018), p. 122.
68 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 3.
69 Beer, p. xx.
70 Michael ONeill, ‘“Visions Rise, and Change”: Emily Brontë’s Poetry and Male Romantic Poetry’, Brontë Studies, 36.1 (2011), 57–63 (p. 57). For a discussion of the gender issue see Steve Vine’s ‘Romantic Ghosts’ cited in note 4.
71 Charlotte Brontë, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ (1850), cited in C. W. Hatfield, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 3.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Peter Cook
Peter Cook is a Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, London. He is a founding member of the Cambridge Branch of the Charles Dickens Fellowship and a member of the British Association for Victorian Studies. He is a reviewer for Brontë Studies, and co-author of that journal’s ‘Brontë Reading Lists’. His book The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens was published in 2018 by Palgrave Macmillan.