Customer Reviews

A Life of Emily Bronte

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Many will be familiar with the Bronte sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Many readers will know Emily Bronte as the author of `Wuthering Heights': a novel which is probably loved and loathed in equal measure. Some of us also are familiar with Emily's poetry. But of Emily herself we tend to know very little directly and this makes her fascinating to those of us who seek to try to understand how a young woman (barely 30 years old when she died) could create `Wuthering Heights' and the contrasting natural worlds in her poetry.

In writing this biography (first published in 1987) Edward Chitham readily acknowledges that Emily sets the biographer a difficult task. In writing this book, Edward Chitham has undertaken an approach which he calls `investigative biography'. He moves from the known facts, through the aspects of the world that Emily must have seen by dint of her existence in time and place, to theories and their supporting bases of evidence. So, what do we learn from this book? In some ways, there are even more questions to explore but it seems unlikely now that we will ever obtain a complete and accurate picture of Emily Bronte. To me this seems entirely appropriate: Emily was secretive, inhabited a rich inner world and seemingly made limited concessions to the `real world'. In short, and to quote Mr Chitham: `[..]`Wuthering Heights' is in all ways consistent with Emily's life as we know it, and in particular with her inner life, as that emerges before us in her rare oracular statements, and especially in her poetry.'

This book will be of interest to those seeking to gain additional insights into Emily. It includes a valuable select bibliography to which I would add the books published since (during the 1990s) by Juliet Barker.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith