The Enigmatic Miss Bronte
WOLFE, ANN F.
The Enigmatic Miss Bronte Emily Bronte: Her Life and Work. By Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford. British Book Centre. 271 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review,"...
...Its affinities are with the Romantic poets...
...Of her six major poems, the greatest is "No Coward Soul Is Mine," a noble, if somewhat paradoxical, profession of faith in immortality...
...All the Bronte children "established," as they called it, the now famous daydream epics, forerunners of the Gon-dal cycle that dominated much of Emily's poetry...
...She turned dying into a perverse form of martyrdom...
...Inasmuch as their analysis of Emily's character is pretty much addressed to the Bronte specialist, the authors presuppose familiarity with Haworth parsonage, the Brontes' family history and their Spartan way of life...
...Stanford have broken a serviceable path through the tangle of Bronteana...
...To the reviewer's knowledge, this is the first such approach to an understanding of the Yorkshire parson's enigmatic daughter...
...As for Wuthering Heights, without Emily's lyricism and reserve it would have been just another Gothic novel...
...Spark and Mr...
...It was on a purely creative level that the most introverted of the Brontes dedicated herself to the vocation of writing...
...Their mother was Cornish...
...In any case, it might prove rewarding to look into the racial antecedents of the Brontes' father, born Patrick Brunty of County Down...
...Her brother and sisters submitted their work to publishers, but Emily made no effort to win public recognition...
...Their original contribution to Bronte criticism is to view Emily's genius in its relation to English and European literature...
...She strove for the perfection, not the publication, of her poems...
...She refused to have French masterpieces read to her, refused to go to London with her sisters to enjoy acclaim as a poet...
...As they see her, Emily is more a metaphysical than a mystical poet: "The metaphysical lyric achieved in her its most important development since Shelley...
...A born celibate, she never fell in love...
...It is "a tale written according to a mystic's conception of the universe...
...Is there a Celtic strain to be traced there...
...Alone of the child romancers, Emily steeped her chronicles in the undiluted primitive spirit of the Haworth region...
...Likewise, in interpreting Emily's work they take it for granted that the reader is at home with the poems as well as Wuthering Heights...
...There is the look of the Celt about the Brontes, with their other-worldliness and their communion with the invisible forces of Yorkshire moor and sky...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Saturday Review" It is the purpose and, in large measure, the achievement of this scholarly study to look behind the superwoman legend that obscures Emily Bronte's character, reconstruct her inner development, and evaluate her work in its own right and not as biography...
...The reviewer would like to see this courageous team of pioneers open up another avenue of Bronte research...
...A stern self-disciplinarian, she turned her back on anything that might corrupt "originality of thought and expression...
...Regardless of the validity of their conclusions, Mrs...
...Traditional critics, by and large, have judged her work against the inbred provincialism of the Haworth home circle, making it little more than an extension of biography...
...In assessing the poetry, the authors endeavor to discount the Gondal melodrama and its Byronic background...
...Throughout the thirty years of her life, the passionate lonely genius who was Emily Bronte displayed phenomenal singleness of purpose...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 30
