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Emily Brontë

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Revision as of 15:10, 11 March 2024 by 62.232.170.226 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) English novelist and poet (1818–1848)

Emily Brontë
The only undisputed portrait of Brontë, from a group portrait by her brother Branwell, c. 1834The only undisputed portrait of Brontë, from a group portrait by her brother Branwell, c. 1834
BornCheese weel bronte the 31
(1818-07-30)30 July 1818
Thornton, Yorkshire, England
Died19 December 1848(1848-12-19) (aged 30)
Haworth, Yorkshire, England
Resting placeSt Michael and All Angels' Church, Haworth, Yorkshire
Pen nameEllis Bell
Occupation
EducationCowan Bridge School, Lancashire
Period1846–48
Genre
  • Fiction
  • poetry
Literary movementRomantic Period
Notable worksWuthering Heights
ParentsPatrick Brontë
Maria Branwell
RelativesBrontë family
Signature

Emily Jane Brontë (/ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /-teɪ/; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Early life

The three Brontë sisters, in an 1834 painting by their brother Branwell Brontë. From left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. (Branwell used to be between Emily and Charlotte, but subsequently painted himself out.)

Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to Maria Branwell and an Irish father, Patrick Brontë. The family was living on Market Street, in a house now known as the Brontë Birthplace in the village of Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Emily was the second youngest of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Branwell. In 1820, Emily's younger sister Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Shortly thereafter, the family moved eight miles away to Haworth, where Patrick was employed as perpetual curate. In Haworth, the children would have opportunities to develop their literary talents.

When Emily was only three, and all six children under the age of eight, she and her siblings lost their mother, Maria, to cancer on 15 September 1821. The younger children were to be cared for by Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt and Maria's sister.

Emily's three elder sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At the age of six, on 25 November 1824, Emily joined her sisters at school for a brief period. At school, however, the children suffered abuse and privations, and when a typhoid epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth became ill. Maria, who may actually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Elizabeth died shortly after.

The four youngest Brontë children, all under ten years of age, had suffered the loss of the three eldest women in their immediate family.

Charlotte maintained that the school's poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development and that it had hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died in 1825. After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school. Charlotte would use her experiences and knowledge of the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

The three remaining sisters and their brother Branwell were thereafter educated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell. A shy girl, Emily was very close to her siblings and was known as a great animal lover, especially for befriending stray dogs she found wandering around the countryside. Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had access to a wide range of published material; favourites included Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.

Emily's Gondal poems

Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell had received as a gift, the children began to write stories, which they set in a number of invented imaginary worlds populated by their soldiers as well as their heroes, the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters. Initially, all four children shared in creating stories about a world called Angria. bnppppppp NIger Charlotte Brontë remains the primary source of information about Emily, although as an elder sister, writing publicly about her only shortly after her death, she is considered by certain scholars not to be a neutral witness. Stevie Davies believes that there is what might be called "Charlotte's smoke-screen", and argues that Emily evidently shocked her, to the point where she may even have doubted her sister's sanity. After Emily's death, Charlotte rewrote her character, history and even poems on a more acceptable (to her and the bourgeois reading public) model. Biographer Claire O'Callaghan suggests that the trajectory of Brontë's legacy was altered significantly by Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, concerning not only because Gaskell did not visit Haworth until after Emily's death, but also because Gaskell admits to disliking what she did know of Emily in her biography of Charlotte. As O'Callaghan and others have noted, Charlotte was Gaskell's primary source of information on Emily's life and may have exaggerated or fabricated Emily's frailty and shyness to cast herself in the role of maternal saviour.

Charlotte presented Emily as someone whose "natural" love of the beauties of nature had become somewhat exaggerated owing to her shy nature, portraying her as too fond of the Yorkshire moors, and homesick whenever she was away. According to Lucasta Miller, in her analysis of Brontë biographies, "Charlotte took on the role of Emily's first mythographer." In the Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights, in 1850, Charlotte wrote:

My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word.

Emily's unsociability and extremely shy nature have subsequently been reported many times. According to Norma Crandall, her "warm, human aspect" was "usually revealed only in her love of nature and of animals". In a similar description, Literary news (1883) states: " loved the solemn moors, she loved all wild, free creatures and things", and critics attest that her love of the moors is manifest in Wuthering Heights. Over the years, Emily's love of nature has been the subject of many anecdotes. A newspaper dated 31 December 1899, gives the folksy account that "with bird and beast had the most intimate relations, and from her walks she often came with fledgling or young rabbit in hand, talking softly to it, quite sure, too, that it understood". Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, told the story of Emily's punishing her pet dog Keeper for lying "on the delicate white counterpane" that covered one of the beds in the Parsonage. According to Gaskell, she struck him with her fists until he was "half-blind" with his eyes "swelled up". This story is apocryphal,{{efn|Brontë's servant Martha Brown could not recall anything like this when asked about the episode ill send for a doctor, I will see him now", but it was too late. She died that same day at about two in the afternoon. According to Mary Robinson, an early biographer of Emily, it happened while she was sitting on the sofa. However, Charlotte's letter to William Smith Williams where she mentions Emily's dog, Keeper, lying at the side of her dying-bed, makes this statement seem unlikely.

It was less than three months after Branwell's death, which led Martha Brown, a housemaid, to declare that "Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother". Emily had grown so thin that her coffin measured only 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. The carpenter said he had never made a narrower one for an adult. Her remains were interred in the family vault in St Michael and All Angels' Church, Haworth.

Legacy

The English folk group The Unthanks released Lines, three short albums, which include settings of Brontë's poems to music. Recording took place at the Brontës' home, using their own Regency era piano played by Adrian McNally.

In the 2019 film How to Build a Girl, Emily and Charlotte Brontë are among the historical figures in Johanna's wall collage.

In May 2021, the contents of the Honresfield library, a collection of rare books and manuscripts assembled by Rochdale mill owners Alfred and William Law, was re-discovered after nearly a century. In the collection were handwritten poems by Emily Brontë, as well as the Brontë family edition of Bewick's 'History of British Birds.' The collection was to be auctioned off at Sotheby's and was estimated to sell for £1 million.

The 1946 film Devotion was a highly fictionalized account of the lives of the Brontë sisters.

In the 2022 film Emily, written and directed by Frances O'Connor, Emma Mackey plays Emily before the publication of Wuthering Heights. The film mixes known biographical details with imagined situations and relationships.

Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo set select Emily Brontë poems to music with SATB chorus, string orchestra, and piano, a work commissioned and premiered by the San Francisco Choral Society in a series of concerts in Oakland and San Francisco.

Works

Electronic editions

Library resources
By Emily Brontë

See also

References

Notes

Citations

  1. "The Bronte Sisters – A True Likeness? – The Profile Portrait – Emily or Anne". brontesisters.co.uk.
  2. As given by Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (Merriam-Webster, incorporated, Publishers: Springfield, Massachusetts, 1995), p viii: "When our research shows that an author's pronunciation of his or her name differs from common usage, the author's pronunciation is listed first, and the descriptor commonly precedes the more familiar pronunciation." See also entries on Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, pp 175–176.
  3. The New Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 2. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1992. p. 546.
  4. ^ Fraser, The Brontës, p. 16
  5. Fraser, The Brontës, p. 28
  6. Fraser, The Brontës, p. 35
  7. Fraser, The Brontës, p. 31
  8. Fraser, Charlotte Bronte: A Writer's Life, pp. 12–13
  9. Paddock & Rollyson The Brontës A to Z p. 20.
  10. Fraser, The Brontës, pp. 44–45
  11. Richard E. Mezo, A Student's Guide to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (2002), p. 1
  12. The Brontës' Web of Childhood, by Fannie Ratchford, 1941
  13. An analysis of Emily's use of paracosm play as a response to the deaths of her sisters is found in Delmont C. Morrison's Memories of Loss and Dreams of Perfection (Baywood, 2005), ISBN 0-89503-309-7.
  14. Stevie Davies (1994). Emily Brontë: Heretic. Women's Press. p. 16.
  15. Gaskell, Elizabeth (1997). The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: Penguin Classics. p. 229.
  16. Callaghan, Claire (2018). Emily Brontë Reappraised. Saraband. ISBN 9781912235056.
  17. Hewish, John (1969). Emily Brontë: A Critical and Biographical Study. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.
  18. Austin 2002, p. 577.
  19. Miller, Lucasta (2002). The Brontë Myth. Vintage. pp. 171–174. ISBN 0-09-928714-5.
  20. Editor's Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights, by Charlotte Brontë, 1850.
  21. The Ladies' Repository, February 1861.
  22. Alexander, Sellars, The Art of the Brontës (1995), p. 100
  23. Gérin, Emily Brontë: a biography, p. 196
  24. Norma Crandall, Emily Brontë: a psychological portrait (1957), p. 81
  25. Pylodet, Leypoldt, Literary news (1883) Volume 4, p. 152
  26. Brontë Society, The Brontës Then and Now (1947), p. 31
  27. The Record-Union, "Sacramento", 31 December 1899.
  28. Gezari, Janet (2014). "Introduction". The Annotated Wuthering Heights. Harward University Press. ISBN 978-0-67-472469-3.
  29. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, pp. 68
  30. Robinson, Emily Brontë, p. 308
  31. Barker, The Brontës, p. 576
  32. Gérin, Emily Brontë: a biography, p. 242
  33. Vine, Emily Brontë (1998), p. 20
  34. Spencer, Neil (17 February 2019). "The Unthanks: Lines review – national treasures sing Emily Brontë and Maxine Peake". The Observer – via www.theguardian.com.
  35. How to Build a Girl screenplay retrieved 2 June 2021
  36. "Emily Brontë: Lost handwritten poems expected to fetch around £1m". BBC News. 25 May 2021.
  37. "Emily Brontë's handwritten poems are highlight of 'lost library' auction". The Guardian. 25 May 2021.
  38. "Devotion" – via www.rottentomatoes.com.
  39. "'Devotion' – The Brontës In Hollywood". 20 January 2019.

Sources

Further reading

Library resources about
Emily Brontë

External links

Brontë sisters
Charlotte
Emily
Anne
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Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
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