Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History Emily BrontëThe Project Gutenberg eBook of Emily Brontë This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. 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 Unpublished Letters of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte.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 |