No coward soul was hers
Jacqueline Banerjee on the lives and afterlives of Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in the village of Thornton, West Yorkshire, far from the mainstream of literary life. She died of tuberculosis at Haworth Parsonage, not six miles away, at the age of thirty. Her work had startled the critics with the force of its passion, but, over the years, shock was to settle into widespread admiration. In 1948, in a note added to the first chapter of The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis described the author as the genius of her family, and her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as “astonishing”. When he added that it was a “kind of sport”, he was implying not its triviality, but its uniqueness. Forty years later, John Sutherland could introduce it in his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction as the “twentieth century’s favourite nineteenth-century novel”. Emily’s poetry, which she published with great reluctance, has also continued to rise in the public estimation. The opening line of one of her poems, “No coward soul is mine”, can now be found emblazoned on mugs and key rings. It is even popular as a tattoo.
Among the flurry of new books published to coincide with the bicentenary of Emily’s birth are a matching pair of hardbacks, priced for the popular market: a new edition of Wuthering Heights, together with a novel by Michael Stewart (who won the Not the Booker prize for King Crow in 2011), Ill Will: The untold story of Heathcliff. In a brief foreword to Wuthering Heights, Stewart acknowledges that the work engages with and subverts various other tropes, but he nevertheless presents it as a “classic gothic novel”. Looking at its two narrators, Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean, he asks: “Are we meant to like these characters? I don’t think so. No more than we are meant to like any of the characters in the book”. This echoes the views of one of the novel’s earliest critics, who, writing in January 1848 in the periodical Atlas, described Emily’s characters as, without exception, “utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible”. In fact, Stewart goes further, suggesting that the author wanted to rub our faces in “our own human frailties and hypocrisies”, exposing the savagery of passion and the “poison at the core” of human nature. This is a grand inducement to reread the novel (the new HQ edition is in good print with no academic frills).
In his own novel, Stewart attempts to supply some of the details that Emily so effectively but tantalizingly omitted in hers. He has done his research, and complements his dark reading of Brontë’s work with details that both reference and support it. He takes up Heathcliff’s story after he has overheard Cathy Earnshaw declare her intention to marry the insipid Edgar Linton, because she feels that her brother Hindley has brought Heathcliff “so low” that marriage to him would degrade her. Had Heathcliff listened to her next words, about the depth and intensity of her feelings for him, and her hopes to elevate him, he might have reacted differently. As it is, he sets out across the moors, seared by this apparent betrayal. At first he aims to find work in Manchester. His early encounters along the way recall the kind of abuse that he endured as a boy. Adopting the name of William Lee, he sees “hostile faces, white faces”, and people enjoying themselves at a village dance in a way he never could. In a pane of glass he confronts his own reflection, that of a “black shadow of a man, barred from life’s feast”. He is an outcast on racial grounds, the archetypal outsider.
This is an understanding championed in previous responses to Wuthering Heights, such as Andrea Arnold’s film adaptation of 2011, and Caryl Phillips’s novel, The Lost Child (2015). Stewart’s William Lee elicits a degree of sympathy, because this deeply disturbed sixteen-year-old is capable of registering social injustice towards others as well as towards himself, and he also responds to the natural world around him, as Cathy has taught him to. But most of what he says, in the form of an outpouring of bitter grievance addressed to Cathy, is filled with vengefulness towards those who mistreated him in the past, particularly Hindley, and those who cross him now. He easily outdoes the original Heathcliff both in his use of obscenities and in his brutality. Perhaps Stewart felt he needed to go much further in these respects for his novel to shock twenty-first-century readers as much as Wuthering Heights shocked the Victorians. The obscenities mingle oddly in the dialogue with dialect words like “laiking” (playing), and anachronisms such as “I could murder a beer”, while the episodes of brutality are described in graphic and harrowing detail. William’s violence towards the end, sparked by what he learns of his origins, is stomach-churning. (If this were a film, young people of William’s own age would probably be barred from watching it.)
As if his propensity to lop off and rip into body parts was not enough, a new slyness creeps into William, as he learns from a young companion how to lengthen his vowels and play on people’s gullibility. The companion is called Emily, and there are some clever touches here, particularly in the way that her fate recalls that of the original author. But since she urges him on, and since her lessons help to arm him for his final revenge when he returns to the Heights, not even this arouses much sympathy.
It is a relief, then, to turn to Nick Holland’s Emily Brontë: A life in twenty poems – in which, incidentally, he dismisses the Atlas reviewer’s hostile remarks as “particularly unperceptive”. Holland’s own approach is much more sympathetic. Emily’s life presents special challenges for would-be biographers, except in the context of the whole Brontë story, but he has got round the scarcity of material neatly and effectively. Out of the 200 or so poems or parts of poems that Emily left behind, he has selected a score which bear on certain important segments of her life, and has treated these segments in largely chronological order. For instance, the poem “A little while, a little while” was written when she was at Law Hill School, Halifax, in 1838, and homesick for Haworth Parsonage, where her family had moved during her infancy. It contains the well-known lines, “what on earth is half so dear – / So longed for, as the hearth of home?” Holland has already discussed her experiences at Law Hill in connection with an earlier poem, “The Night is Darkening Round Me”, so the section featuring this poem is used to illuminate her struggles during her other long absence from home when she accompanied Charlotte to Brussels early in 1842. Holland duly records the speed with which she picked up French there, her tutor M. Heger’s compliments about her exceptional intelligence, and her reserve towards her fellow pupils. He also notes some brief philosophical comments in her devoirs which betray her grim view of human nature and the human lot, but he does so primarily to stress her exceptional intellect, and the strength which she somehow summoned up, to endure her separation from her beloved Haworth.
Without subjecting the poems to detailed critical analysis – which is not his purpose here – Holland provides helpful contexts for them, and insights into them. Such is very much the case with “No coward soul is mine”, which leads him to reflect on Emily’s religious faith. He looks broadly at the trends in the Church of England and the competition it faced from Dissenters, both generally and in Haworth itself, and then at the two other Brontë sisters’ personal faiths, and their brother Branwell’s falling away from the Church. When he comes to the vexed question of Emily’s own private beliefs and spiritual visions or visitations, he has everything he needs for a thorough discussion of them. Her rejection of the “thousand creeds” on offer can be better appreciated now, as can her steadfast adherence to the “Faith” (capitalized in the poem) that reassures her. Not for her the conventional idea of heaven; rather, she trusts in the “eternal years”, or, as Holland puts it, the “endless natural cycle of death and rebirth” which she experienced on the moors around her.
As for visionary experiences, Holland traces these through several other poems, concluding that she did have moments of spiritual exaltation, and – an important point – that she felt that they came from within. Much as her contemporaries would have disapproved of such beliefs, he suggests, she continued to hold fast to her own sense of “God within my breast”, as she expresses it early in this much-loved poem. Holland refers to other literary visionaries, such as Blake, and “modern practitioners of the occult”, but leaves it to the reader to decide how far such episodes are “all in the mind” – only adding that, to those who experience them, they are evidently as real as anything happening around them.
Emily Brontë Reappraised, Claire O’Callaghan’s tribute, is thoughtful in a different way, without Holland’s inwardness, but with an astringent note of common sense. It is an informally written, no-nonsense reappraisal. There is something admirable about cutting through the thickets of Brontëana and refusing to speculate about things that can never be known, although it does lead her to give short shrift to the idea of “Emily-as-mystic” in her final chapter. This is almost inevitable: an important aspect of O’Callaghan’s reappraisal is to portray her subject as one of those “strong, gutsy women” who are valued in society today, no less of a proto-feminist than her more outspoken sisters. In the juvenilia set in the fantasy country of Gondal, O’Callaghan points out, “Emily’s female characters are bold, ambitious and emancipated rebels who frequently usurp traditional gender roles”, while in Wuthering Heights itself, Cathy identifies with Heathcliff, not he with her. The last part of her chapter on “Emily and Feminism” focuses on Heathcliff’s harsh treatment of Linton’s sister Isabella, who becomes besotted with him and whom he abuses after marriage. O’Callaghan finds a message here similar to that delivered more explicitly by Anne Brontë in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: women should not “succumb to ‘bad’ romantic figures”. Is this, then, the moral that earlier critics (and Michael Stewart) have found so hard to locate? It is clear that O’Callaghan herself finds more in Wuthering Heights than “a feminist commentary on gender and domestic abuse” (for instance, in the previous chapter she writes warmly about Emily’s affinity with nature). But this is her strongest argument for the novel’s continuing relevance in our own century.
Emily Brontë Reappraised is much more readable than most jargon-ridden academic articles. The last chapter, “Emily – Real and Fake News”, takes the form of bite-sized chunks in which O’Callaghan debunks some myths about her subject, such as that Emily had “visitations”, and finds the truth in others: yes, she was a domestic goddess; her bread-making skills were known throughout Haworth! It seems part of this friendly approach that there are small slips here and there, of the sort that are endemic on social media (“whose” for “who’s”, for example), but it is unfortunate that these were not picked up in the editing process.
O’Callaghan confirms Emily’s prowess at the piano as well as in the kitchen: “her music books reveal that she played Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn”, she says. John Hennessy goes nearly 500 pages further on this topic, and definitely shares the prize with Nick Holland for labouring long in the Brontë vineyard. In the fourth and by far the longest part of his Emily Jane Brontë and Her Music, he has itemized and discussed every single piece of music known to have been owned by the Brontës – a Herculean task, since it ranges from the thirty-seven pieces of sheet music in the two youngest Brontës’ “Parrish Collection” to their brother Branwell’s flute book, taking in several other volumes on the way. This fills one of the few gaps in Brontë studies, and helps him to address the question of how far Emily’s writing was influenced by her extensive exposure to music, and her “precision and brilliancy” at the piano, as recalled by Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey.
To begin with, Hennessy is on firm ground. His first chapter provides a brief social context and a masterly discussion of the changing cultural scene in England during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially as these would have impinged on the family at Haworth, and especially as regards music: he has even looked into the archives of their father Patrick’s previous incumbency, Thornton Chapel, to see what instruments and music were available for use there. Hennessy then examines in detail the music to which Emily herself would have been exposed, and which she would have played. Here, too, are many facts worth sharing. A fine cabinet piano with a gold-painted panel above it arrived at Haworth Parsonage a little after July 1833; Hennessy traces its history over the years until its restoration and reinstallation in the parsonage in 2010 – an amazing story in itself, considering its fragility. on this piano, possibly after having had some preliminary lessons from the siblings’ music teacher, the young Emily learned the skill later honed during her stay in Brussels – an aspect of her experience there that is generally overlooked.
Is it possible, though, to say with any certainty “that Emily’s musicality was a key component in her literary creativity”? Here the ground is less solid. But Hennessy links her closely to Romanticism in all its cultural manifestations, including music (especially Beethoven’s), and explores in detail the metrical sophistication of her poetry. He quotes C. Day Lewis on the “dragging”, funereal rhythm of “Remembrance” (“Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee”) to great effect, and briefly examines Robert K. Wallace’s work on Wuthering Heights in Emily Brontë and Beethoven: Romantic equilibrium in fiction and music (1986). But it is hard to demonstrate any specific crossover, and this part of John Hennessy’s discussion, while gamely attempted and appealing, can only be speculative. He does not claim otherwise, and so this is in no way a criticism of his welcome addition to Brontë studies.