Emily Brontë was born at Hartshead-cum-Clifton, near Leeds, in 1818, and lived at the parsonage at Haworth from 1820 to her death. The monotony of this existence was broken only by a brief attempt to be a governess and by a short stay at Brussels in 1842, all exile from home being excessively painful and hurtful to her. She died of consumption at Haworth on the 19th of December, 1848. She published, in conjunction with her sisters, “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell,” in 1846, and, alone, the novel of “Wuthering Heights” in 1847.

Personal

	No coward soul is mine,
	No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
	I see Heaven’s glories shine,
	And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

	… She—
	(How shall I sing her?) whose soul
	Knew no fellow for might,
	Passion, vehemence, grief,
	Daring, since Byron died,
	That world-fam’d Son of Fire; She, who sank
	Baffled, unknown, self-consum’d;
	Whose too bold dying song
	Shook, like a clarion-blast, my soul.

  The feeling which in Charlotte partook of something of the nature of an affection, was, with Emily, more of a passion. Some one speaking of her to me, in a careless kind of strength of expression, said, “she never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals.” The helplessness of an animal was its passport to Charlotte’s heart; the fierce, wild, intractability of its nature was what often recommended it to Emily. Speaking of her dead sister, the former told me that from her many traits in Shirley’s character were taken; her way of sitting on the rug reading, with her arm round her rough bull-dog’s neck; her calling to a strange dog, running past, with hanging head and lolling tongue, to give it a merciful draught of water, its maddened snap at her, her nobly stern presence of mind, going right into the kitchen, and taking up one of Tabby’s red-hot Italian irons to sear the bitten place, and telling no one, till the danger was well-nigh over, for fear of the terrors that might beset their weaker minds. All this, looked upon as a well-invented fiction in “Shirley,” was written by Charlotte with streaming eyes; it was the literal true account of what Emily had done.

  Emily Brontë had … a lithesome, graceful figure. She was the tallest person in the house, except her father. Her hair, which was naturally as beautiful as Charlotte’s, was in the same unbecoming tight curl and frizz; and there was the same want of complexion. She had very beautiful eyes—kind, kindling, liquid eyes; but she did not often look at you; she was too reserved. Their color might be said to be dark-gray, at other times dark-blue, they varied so. She talked very little. She and Anne were like twins—inseparable companions, and in the very closest sympathy, which never had any interruption.

  Her chief delight was to roam on the moors, followed by her dogs, to whom she would whistle in masculine fashion. Her heart, indeed, was given to these dumb creatures of the earth. She never forgave those who ill-treated them, nor trusted those whom they disliked. One is reminded of Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant” by some traits of Emily Brontë;… like the lady of the poem, her tenderness and charity could reach even

	——the poor banished insects, whose intent,
	Although they did ill, was innocent.

  Not even the unstinted praise of three great and very dissimilar poets has given to Emily Brontë her due rank in popular esteem. Her work is not universally acceptable, even to imaginative readers; her personality is almost repulsive to many who have schooled themselves to endure the vehemence of genius but not its ominous self-restraint. Most people were afraid of Emily Brontë’s “whitening face and set mouth” when she was alive, and even now that she is dead her memory seems to inspire more terror than affection. Against an instinctive repugnance it is in vain to reason, and in discussing her poetical quality we must assume that her power has at least been felt and not disliked by the reader, since “you must love her, ere to you she should seem worthy to be loved.” Those who have come under the spell of her genius will expect no apology for her intellectual rebellion, her stoic harshness of purpose, her more than manlike strength. She was a native blossom of those dreary and fascinating moorlands of which Charlotte has given, in a few brilliant phrases, so perfect a description, and like the acrid heaths and gentians that flourish in the peat, to transplant her was to kill her. Her actions, like her writings, were strange, but consistent in their strangeness. Even the dreadful incident of her death, which occurred as she stood upright in the little parlour at Haworth, refusing to go to bed, but just leaning one hand upon the table, seems to me to be no unfit ending for a life so impatient of constraint from others, so implacable in its slavery to its own principles.

  In 1833 Emily was nearly fifteen, a tall, long-armed girl, full grown, elastic of tread; with a slight figure that looked queenly in her best dresses, but loose and boyish when she slouched over the moors whistling to her dogs, and taking long strides over the rough earth. A tall, thin, loose-jointed girl—not ugly, but with irregular features and a pallid, thick complexion. Her dark-brown hair was naturally beautiful, and in later days looked well loosely fastened with a tall comb at the back of her head; but in 1833 she wore it in an unbecoming tight curl and frizz. She had very beautiful eyes of haze color…. She had an aquiline nose, a large expressive, prominent mouth. She talked little. No grace or style in dress belonged to Emily, but under her awkward clothes her natural movements had the lithe beauty of the wild creatures that she loved…. Never was a soul with a more passionate love of Mother Earth, of every weed and flower, of every bird, beast and insect that lived. She would have peopled the house with pets had not Miss Branwell kept her niece’s love of animals in due subjection. Only one dog was allowed, who was admitted into the parlor at stated hours, but out of doors Emily made friends with all the beasts and birds. She would come home carrying in her hands some young bird or rabbit, and softly talking to it as she came. “Ee, Miss Emily,” the young servant would say, “one would think the bird could understand you.” “I am sure it can,” Emily would answer. “Oh, I am sure it can.”… Two lives went on side by side in her heart, neither ever mingling with or interrupting the other. Practical housewife with capable hands, dreamer of strange horrors: each self was independent of the companion to which it was linked by day and night. People in those days knew her but as she seemed—“t’ Vicar’s Emily”—a shy awkward girl, never teaching in Sunday-school like her sisters, never talking with the villagers like merry Branwell, but very good and hearty in helping the sick and distressed: not pretty in the village estimation—a “slinky lass,” no prim, trim little body like pretty Anne, nor with Charlotte Brontë’s taste in dress; just a clever lass with a spirit of her own. So the village judged her. At home they loved her with her strong feelings, untidy frocks, indomitable will and ready contempt for the commonplace; she was appreciated as a dear and necessary member of the household. Of Emily’s deeper self, her violent genius, neither friend nor neighbor dreamed in those days.

  Though Emily Brontë’s life was not an eventful one in the usual sense of the word, it may certainly be called a crowded life. That twenty-nine years was not a large demesne, but it was fertile enough, though only with rue and rosemary and nightshade and the poppy that bloomed before the harvest.

  Few persons of whom so little has been or can be recorded as Emily Brontë have made so deep an impression upon the popular mind, or are so distinctly present to the imagination. There is nothing to be said except that she was born in August 1818, and died of consumption in December 1848; that she was first a teacher without pupils, and then an authoress without readers; that her life was harassed by an impracticable father, and infected by a base, profligate brother; and that nevertheless she was visited by such noble inspirations, and was such a piece of her own moorland, that one hardly accounts her unfortunate. She was the laureate of the moors, and no fanciful analogy might be drawn between her and these scenes of her residence, and objects of her affections. Like them she was free, rough, wild; in a certain sense barren and limited; in another sense rich and expansive; from one point of view mournful, from another joyous. In one respect only is she false to the teaching of the nature that environed her; the moor is ever healthy, but it is impossible to acquit the creator of “Heathcliff” of a taint of unsoundness.

  The reticent and sadly straightened genius of Emily Brontë found wings only on the Yorkshire moors. In her dusty laborious life as a teacher, always one vision of delight appeared to her:—

	“A little and a lone green lane
	That opened on a common wide;
	A distant, dreamy, dim, blue chain
	Of mountains circling every side.
	A heaven so clear, an earth so calm,
	So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air;
	And deepening still the dream-like charm,
	Wild moorsheep feeding everywhere.”

You do not think of “calm” and “charm” as a blemish; there is a sob in the singer’s voice, and it is in the magic mirror of a teardrop that she sees the “moorsheep feeding everywhere.”

Wuthering Heights, 1847

  I trust you have not, as we have, wasted your time on “that little family in Hell,” living and dying at “Wuthering Heights.” It is a most signal waste of talent. There is a certain resemblance to Jane Eyre, like a family look; the energy of thought and style, the northern mind as well as air that breathes through it, the intimate and masterly acquaintance with a location and coterie, and exclusion from the world, the remarkable directness of style, are all qualities peculiar, and marvelously like Jane Eyre, so that I think the author must be her brother, the masculine of her masculine mind.

  “Wuthering Heights” was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister: a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour the crag took human shape; and there it stands, colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow gray, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.

  I’ve been greatly interested in “Wuthering Heights,” the first novel I’ve read for an age, and the best (as regards power and sound style) for two ages, except “Sidonia.” But it is a fiend of a book—an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brownrigg. The action is laid in hell,—only it seems places and people have English names there.

  Emily Brontë—for it is now time that we should say something of the two other persons in this remarkable trio—was, in certain respects, the most extraordinary of the three sisters. She has this distinction at any rate, that she has written a book which stands as completely alone in the language as does the “Paradise Lost” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”… Its power is absolutely Titanic: from the first page to the last it reads like the intellectual throes of a giant. It is fearful, it is true, and perhaps one of the most unpleasant books ever written: but we stand in amaze at the almost incredible fact that it was written by a slim country girl who would have passed in a crowd as an insignificant person, and who had had little or no experience of the ways of the world…. We challenge the world to produce another work in which the whole atmosphere seems so surcharged with suppressed electricity, and bound in with the blackness of tempest and desolation.

  Twice or thrice especially the details of deliberate or passionate brutality in Heathcliff’s treatment of his victims make the reader feel for a moment as though he were reading a police report or even a novel by some French “naturalists” of the latest and brutallest order. But the pervading atmosphere of the book is so high and healthy that the effect even of those “vivid and fearful scenes” which impaired the rest of Charlotte Brontë is almost at once neutralized—we may hardly say softened, but sweetened, dispersed, and transfigured—by the general impression of noble purity and passionate straightforwardness, which removes it at once and forever from any such ugly possibility of association or comparison. The whole work is not more incomparable in the effect of its atmosphere or landscape than in the peculiar note of its wild and bitter pathos; but most of all is it unique in the special and distinctive character of its passion. The love which devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it than flame or sunlight. And this passionate and ardent chastity is utterably and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious. Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave.

  As to the capability of Branwell to write “Wuthering Heights,” not much need be said here. Those who read this book will see that, despite his weaknesses and his follies, Branwell was, indeed, unfortunate in having to bear the penalty, in ceaseless open discussion, of “une fanfaronnade des vices qu’il n’avait pas,” and that, moreover, his memory has been darkened, and his acts misconstrued, by sundry writers, who have endeavoured to find in his character the source of the darkest passages in the works of his sisters. Far from being hopelessly a “miserable fellow,” an “unprincipled dreamer,” an “unnerved and garrulous prodigal,” as we have been told he was, he had, in fact, within him, an abundance of worthy ambition, a modest confidence in his own ability, which he was never known to vaunt, and a just pride in the celebrity of his family, which, it may be trusted, will remove from him, at any rate, the imputation of a lack of moral power to do anything good or forcible at all. Those who have heard fall from the lips of Branwell Brontë—and they are few now—all those weird stories, strange imaginings, and vivid and brilliant disquisitions on the life of the people of the West Riding, will recognize that there was at least no opposition, but rather an affinity, between the tendency of his thoughts and those of the author of “Wuthering Heights.”

  Undoubtedly, Emily Brontë’s genius was unique and masterful, and her book will always charm individual readers. It has been compared with Shelley’s “Cenci” and with Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi.” All such comparisons, of course, only go to indicate a generic likeness, but they sufficiently explain the tale’s little popularity. It might not be altogether a good sign for such works to be popular; they are for a “fit audience, though few,”—not for the many. They would not be wholesome food for all, and might cause a mental indigestion. Not every reader can assimilate such strong food, or turn it to good purpose. Those who can, will find it attract them irresistibly. Faulty as a narrative, “Wuthering Heights” burns with energy and pulses with life-blood. It is a poem without the accompaniment of rhyme.

  In “Wuthering Heights” we have the first novel of a young woman with little knowledge either of literature or of life, and yet the story is told with compactness and force, scenery is described with marvelous vividness and sympathy, characters are represented with amazing individuality, while, though incidents and characters are at times so appalling that many readers turn from the book in horror, there is such power, both of personality and of treatment, as positively fascinates even while it terrifies. But it should be noted Emily Brontë had no conscious intention of exciting terror. It is true that, as Heathcliff reveals himself in all his savagery, one stands aghast at his wolfish ferocity; yet one can plainly see that the author is not seeking for means of affecting her readers, but, heedless of readers, is working out her altogether astounding conception.

  She wrote “Wuthering Heights” because she was impelled thereto, and the book, with all its morbid force and fire, will remain, for all time, as a monument of the most striking genius that nineteenth century womanhood has given us. It was partly her life in Yorkshire—the local colour was mainly derived from her brief experience as a governess at Halifax—but it was partly, also, the German fiction which she had devoured during the Brussels period, that inspired “Wuthering Heights.”

  Beyond the madness and terror of “Wuthering Heights,” romantic fiction has never gone. Its spiritual counterpart in real life is Emily Brontë, who preserved her inexorable will far into the day on which she died.

  The heroines of Emily Brontë have not the artistic completeness of Charlotte Brontë’s. They are blocked out with hysterical force, and in their character there is something elemental, as if, like the man who beat and browbeat them, they too were close to the savagery of nature. The sort of supernaturalism, which appears here and there in their story, wants the refinement of the telepathy and presentiment which play a part in Jane Eyre, but it is still more effectual in the ruder clutch which it lays upon the fancy. In her dealing with the wild passion of Heathcliff for the first Catharine, Emily Brontë does not keep even such slight terms with convention as Charlotte does in the love of Rochester and Jane Eyre; but this fierce longing, stated as it were in its own language, is still farther from anything that corrupts or tempts; it is as wholesome and decent as a thunder-storm, in the consciousness of the witness. The perversities of the mutual attraction of the lovers are rendered without apparent sense on the part of the author that they can seem out of nature, so deeply does she feel them to be in nature, and there is no hint from her that they need any sort of proof…. No one can deny the charm of this, the absolute reality, the consummate art, which is still art, however unconscious. Did the dying girl who wrote the strange book, where it is only one of so many scenes of unfaltering truth, know how great it was, with all its defects? In any case criticism must recognize its mastery, and rejoice in its courage.

Poems

  The poetry of Emily Brontë is small in extent and conventional in form. Its burning thoughts are concealed for the most part in the tame and ambling measures dedicated to female verse by the practice of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. That she was progressing to the last even in this matter of the form is shown by the little posthumous collection of her verses issued by Charlotte, consisting of early, and very weak pieces, and of two poems written in the last year of her life, which attain, for the first time the majesty of rhythm demanded by such sublime emotions. But it is impossible not to regret that she missed that accomplishment in the art of poetry which gives an added force to the verse of her great French contemporary, Marceline Valmore, the only modern poetess who can fitly be compared with Emily Brontë for power of expressing passion in its simplicity…. It is difficult to praise Emily’s three or four greatest poems without an air of exaggeration. Finest among them all is that outburst of agnostic faith that was found by Charlotte on her desk when she died, a “last poem” not to be surpassed in dignity and self-reliance by any in the language.

  Some of Emily’s poems in this book are full of such original and intense—though hardly attractive—writing as gives her quite a unique and lofty position among our poets. The note of these poems comes very near despair, but such is the strength of Emily’s character that it is rather a desperate courage. Self-dependent in every act and thought of her life, she will recognise nothing in the universe but the beauty of the external world and the strength of her own intellectual being. She expresses no hope in the future or in a God other than a vague pantheistic hope; she throws abroad small sympathy for her fellow-beings. The history of the world does not entice her to be its prophetess; she breathes into her poetry only her individual self, but expresses that self so nobly that we find in some of her verses the elements of such a character as in different circumstances might have turned her into a Maid of Orleans, or a Madam Roland. The soul of Emily Brontë was ever

“Struggling fierce toward Heaven’s free wilderness.”

with strong wings, and with the loneliness of wings.

  Her poetry, in general less powerful, is more pleasing than her fiction; harsh and forbidding as her view of life seems at first, it gains upon us as we realise her proud superiority to external circumstances, and the passionate affection for those she really loves, which redeems her unamiability towards the rest…. Almost all the poetry which Emily Brontë published during her lifetime was of this character, though not always attaining the same careless beauty, graceful in its apparent negligence. Not until nigh to death did she compose a strain of quite another sort, which, if it were just to judge her solely by one supreme inspiration, would place her above every other female lyrist since Sappho. The grandeur and eloquence of her last verses have in our judgment never been rivalled by any English poetess: the question whether she could have maintained herself at such an elevation, were it capable of an answer, would help to elucidate the deeper problem how far poetical inspiration is the result of favourable conditions, and how far it is a visitation from above. It must remain for ever unanswered.

  Her best verse is perhaps the greatest ever written by a woman. “Last Lines” and “The Old Stoic” will rank with the finest poetry in our literature.

General

  Emily had a head for logic and a capability of argument, unusual in a man, and rare indeed in a woman, according to M. Héger. Impairing the force of this gift was a stubborn tenacity of will, which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes or her own sense of right was concerned. “She should have been a man—a great navigator,” said M. Héger in speaking of her “Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty—never have given way but with life.” And yet, moreover, her faculty of imagination was such that, if she had written a history, her view of scenes and characters would have been so vivid, and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument, that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions or his cooler perceptions of its truth.

  To Emily Brontë’s genius justice seems hardly to have been done. Her sister, indeed, recognised, and may be said to have adored it. Emily Brontë’s mind was at once dark and luminous, like the eyes of an Indian. Her qualities were each and all splendid, but too massive and masculine for her frail frame, worn and worried by consumption. “Wuthering Heights” is a noble work. Frequent passages haunt one like scenes from “Macbeth” or the “Cenci.” In some points her genius seems superior to her sister’s.

  Emily Brontë was a wild, original, and striking creature, but her one book is a kind of prose “Kubla Khan”—a nightmare of the superheated imagination.

  The author of “Wuthering Heights” still remains, what she has ever been, the sphinx of literature…. Her genius may be compared to a mountain peak, whose bold contour compels attention yet forbids approach; bare, steep, affording no foothold to the explorer, and shrouding its summit in clouds which shift but do not lift; a Matterhorn which no Whymper has yet appeared to scale. To this proud isolation of spirit is partly due the strong originality which places her in a rank above her sister, and explains why those who have appreciated her—from Sydney Dobell to Mr. Swinburne—have been fit, if few.

  Her “Wuthering Heights” is a strange, forbidding tale, and no one can read it without wondering how characters and incidents so coarse and repulsive could ever have occurred to a being so retiring and so ignorant of life as she. We have seen how Dr. Wright in his “Brontës in Ireland” has plausibly suggested that the knowledge of the seamy side of human character and life revealed in the work of these sisters came to them from their familiarity with the legends concerning the older Brontës, with which he supposes their father’s memory to have been stored; but until his theory finds for itself a firmer basis of authentic fact, Emily Brontë must remain the Sphinx of Victorian literature.

  To me Emily Brontë is chiefly interesting as the double of her sister, exaggerating at once and softening her character and genius as showing those limits of superior sense and judgment which restrained her, and the softer lights which a better developed humanity threw over the landscape common to them both.

  In sheer genius Emily Brontë probably surpassed Charlotte, though in art she was certainly the inferior of her elder sister. All that she wrote bears the stamp of her sombre imagination and of the gloomy strength of her character.