Poet of the Moors

...These "visions," however, seem to be nothing more than the poetic hyperbole of Romantic metaphysics such as one sees in Shelley...

...The absence of any work 'meriting' preservation is ominous, and argues the extinction in her of the ability to write...

...Miss Gerin's study is excellently researched...

...This theory lost credence when Branwell's own inferior writings came to light in this century...

...in using Emily's own poetic terms to describe the vision of the "Strange Power" who came "like visitant of air" to inspire her verse, Miss Gerin makes of Emily a Saint Theresa of Avila...

...Her family nickname was "the Major," and she could be extremely stubborn-in the three months she was dying she refused to have any medical help, and continued performing many regular tasks until the morning of her death...

...For many years Emily's love poetry was thought to have been inspired by a mysterious personal experience akin to Emily Dickinson's, until the discovery that these poems concerned characters from "Gondal," an imaginary land she and Anne had created in childhood...

...In contrast, Emily is impersonal and philosophic, and her writings are free from the moral judgments found in her sisters' work...

...Winifred Gerin, who has already completed biographies of the other three Brontes, now concludes her cycle with Emily...

...watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth...

...or at the end when Lockwood, standing at the triple grave, "lingered round them, under that benign sky...

...in the latter days of Branwell's decline she seems to have stopped writing...

...Emily Bronte's work has stood for many different things as literary fashion has changed...

...in addition, her understanding of the family relationships is sensitive, her narrative engrossing, and her reconstruction of Emily plausible...

...she kept a large, fierce dog that others feared...

...though she lacks the imagination that contributes to the genius of Charlotte, her novels are more interesting than is generally acknowledged...

...If, as has been claimed, Emily is a greater poet than novelist, one must also admit that she achieved some of her greatest poetry in her novel...

...Yet of the three sisters Emily has always occasioned the greatest speculation because of the discrepancy between her violent and vigorous writings and her reclusive and reticent life...

...But there is one prominent fault-a lack of psychological vocabulary...

...Miss Gerin sees the key to Emily's remarkable creative powers in those circumstances which allowed her to develop in her own way, while Anne and Charlotte were conforming to the dictates of their teaching positions and Branwell was being destroyed by his inability to succeed in any fine of work...

...And while Christopher Caudwell found in it "a wild virility, a kind of quintessence of masculinity," Virginia Woolf affirmed that of all feminine novelists only Jane Austen and Emily Bronte "wrote as women write" without trying to sound like men...

...Herbert Read, disagreeing, wrote that in "its unerring unity of conception and its full catharsis of the emotions of pity and terror [Wuthering Heights is] one of the very few occasions on which the novel has reached the dignity of classical tragedy...

...Walter Pater called it the "really characteristic fruit" of the spirit of romanticism...

...Still, this biography-like the three that preceded it-is obviously a labor of love and succeeds, as Miss Gerin hoped, in allowing Emily to "be seen more freshly and more completely than before...

...The greatness of Wuthering Heights rests in its harrowing portrait of obsession...

...The unfinished manuscript of a second novel and some other effects are known to have existed at the time of her death but were destroyed, either by her request or through Charlotte's judgment that they were not worth preserving...

...she nursed Bran-well in his bouts of delirium tremens...

...In the biographer's belief, "The effect on her of Branwell's degradation was to poison every source of life-above all, the life of imagination that made her a poet...

...9.95 Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell "My sister Emily," wrote Charlotte Bronte in posthumous reminiscence, "was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicenced...

...Sir Herbert Read has referred (in Reason and Romanticism) to Emily's "psychical hermaphroditism," and Miss Gerin's own account of the final withdrawal suggests a latent schizophrenia, although she does not pursue the idea...

...The individual gifts of the three Bronte sisters invite comparison...

...Yet to offset this there are wonderful poetic descriptions: the famous one of Catherine picking through the feathers in her pillow, identifying the birds they came from, as a metaphor for her own state...

...In this case local atmosphere is as good a source as any, since very little primary source material for Emily is available: She scarcely wrote letters, and kept her thoughts to herself...

...Miss Gerin has spent 10 years living in Haworth village on the Yorkshire moors, near the parsonage where the Brontes lived most of their brief lives...

...In the years that she lived at home alone, she wrote most of her best poetry...

...Early reviewers found Wuthering Heights "brutal, dogged, and morose...

...Charlotte stressed its rusticity-It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath" -and characterized her sister as a natural, a "nursling of the moors," controlled by rather than in control of her subject...

...Charlotte revered her without understanding her...

...In describing an adventure, Heathcliff says, "I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom...

...no other member of the family lived to write a memoir...

...Literary terminology troubles her somewhat, too...

...Ever since the identities of "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" were revealed, Charlotte, Emily and Anne have been a subject of fascination to biographers...

...Likewise, in stressing the influence of the gothic novel on Wuthering Heights, she neglects to discuss the origins of the book's powerful psychological metaphors...

...The fifth child of a Yorkshire parson, she saw little of the outside world (and that little with indifference), combining aloofness with intense practicality: She became her father's housekeeper, but also learned to fire his pistols...

...This deficiency prevents her from exploring certain aspects of Emily's personality, and sometimes causes her writing to sound rather shallow and antiquated...

...In the absence or obfuscation of many personal records, Emily's life and character must often be reconstructed from analysis of her work, conjecture and, sometimes, intuition...

...Charlotte is remarkable for her presentation of human passions and her intensely personal viewpoint...

...its characters strike us as forces rather than as human beings...

...Anne is shrewd at observation and self-analysis...

...To be sure, the writing is often clumsy or stilted...

...Some critics tried to prove that Wuthering Heights was really the work of brother Branwell, since no woman could have written anything so powerful...