The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Emily Bronte spent most of her life in a stone parsonage in the small village of Haworth on the wild and bleak Yorkshire moors. She was the fifth of Patrick and Maria Bronte's six children. Her father was a clergyman; her mother died when she was two. At the age of six, she was sent away to a school for the daughters of poor clergy with her three elder sisters; within a year, the two oldest girls had died, in part the result of the school's harsh and unhealthy conditions, which Charlotte Bronte was later to portray in Jane Eyre (1847). Mr. Bronte brought his two remaining daughters home, where, together with their brother and younger sister, he educated them himself. Emily was the most reclusive and private of the children; she shunned the company of those outside her family and suffered acutely from homesickness in her few short stays away from the parsonage.

Despite the isolation of Haworth, the Bronte family shared a rich literary life. Mr. Bronte discussed poetry, history, and politics with his children, and the children themselves created an extraordinary fantasy world together. When Mr. Bronte gave his son a box of wooden soldiers, each child excitedly seized one and named it. The soldiers became for them the centers of an increasingly elaborate set of stories that they first acted out in plays and later recorded in a series of book-length manuscripts, composed for the most part by Charlotte and her brother, Branwell. The two younger children, Emily and Anne, later started a separate series, a chronicle about an imaginary island called Gondal.

In 1850 Charlotte Bronte told the story of how she and her sisters came to write for publication. One day when she accidentally came upon a manuscript volume of verse in Emily's handwriting, she was struck by the conviction "that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write." With some difficulty, Charlotte persuaded her intensely private sister to publish some of her poems in a selection of poetry by all three Bronte sisters. Averse to personal publicity and afraid that "authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice," Charlotte, Emily, and Anne adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although the 1846 book sold only two copies, its publication inspired each of the Bronte sisters to begin work on a novel; Emily's was Wuthering Heights (1847). She began work on a second novel, but a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights, she died of tuberculosis.

Many of Emily's poems�"Remembrance" and "The Prisoner," for example�were written for the Gondal saga and express its preoccupation with political intrigue, passionate love, rebellion, war, imprisonment, and exile. Bronte also wrote personal lyrics unconnected with the Gondal stories; but both groups of poems share a drive to break through the constrictions of ordinary life, whether by the transfigurative power of the imagination, by union with another, or by death itself. Like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the speakers of Bronte's poems yearn for a fuller, freer world of spirit, transcending the forms and limits of mortal life. Her concern with a visionary world links her to the Romantic poets, particularly to Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley; but her hymnlike stanzas have a haunting quality that distinguishes her individual voice.

I'm happiest when most away

I'm happiest when most away I can bear my soul from its home of clay On a windy night when the moon is bright And the eye can wander through worlds of light�

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131 2 / EMIL Y BRONT E 5 When I am not and none beside� Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky� But only spirit wandering wide Through infinite immensity. 1838 1910 The Night-Wind In summer's mellow midnight, A cloudless moon shone through Our open parlour window And rosetrees wet with dew. ? I sat in silent musing, The soft wind waved my hair: It told me Heaven was glorious. And sleeping Earth was fair. ioI needed not its breathing To bring such thoughts to me, But still it whispered lowly, "How dark the woods will be! 15"The thick leaves in my murmur Are rustling like a dream, And all their myriad voices Instinct0 with spirit seem." imbued 20I said, "Go, gentle singer, Thy wooing voice is kind, But do not think its music Has power to reach my mind. "Play with the scented flower, The young tree's supple bough, And leave my human feelings In their own course to flow." 25 The wanderer would not leave me; Its kiss grew warmer still� "O come," it sighed so sweetly, "I'll win thee 'gainst thy will. 30"Have we not been from childhood friends? Have I not loved thee long? As long as thou hast loved the night Whose silence wakes my song. "And when thy heart is laid at rest Beneath the church-yard stone

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REMEMBRANCE / 131 3

35 I shall have time enough to mourn And thou to be alone."

1840 1850

Remembrance1