Dossier for Emili

WINIFRED GERIN

Emily Bronze: A Critical and BiogtupIL Study John Hewish (Macmillan 50s) Mr Hewish has defined the purpose of h book at the outset; it is a critical and hi graphical study (in that order) and not attempt `to produce a full or definitive life It turns out to be something both less co plete and more original. It is a painstak examination of all the known sources evidence on Emily Bronte's life and work; bibliographer's book rather than a b. rapher's or a critic's. That it reads at ti rather like an autopsy on the bodies of of men's books is nerhaps unavoidable, for is the causes of their failure that he seeks.

The work is divided into three parts: 't Life', 'Wuthering Heights', and `Public Critics, from 1846-1968'. It is with the s Lion on Emily's life that readers will pro ably be the most disappointed if they co to the book expecting something new: t they will not find ; Mr Hewish contents hi self with a summary of the scant events t made up the visibly happenings of a whose main experiences were not lived the surface. Even in the section devoted Emily's life, Mr Hewish has shown it chi as reflected in the writings. He is very picious of accepting any part of what terms :the legends' that have grown up rou Emily Bronte's life, and treats them li barnacles to be scraped away from the h ,of a sunken ship.

In this he is partially justified, for all t much that is unashamedly fictional, seri mental and pseudo-scientific has been writt• on Emily Brontë (and especially in the fi half of this century), but I cannot go whole way with Mr Hewish's suspicion the first memorialists, for they are the on ones who knew her. He discards, for stance, the only evidence which can ‘s credence be added to that of Charlotte. E Nussey, Mary Taylor_and M Heger, that the parsonage servant Martha Bros Martha Brown and her sisters lived to g both Mis Gaskell and Mary Robin (Duclaux) those domestic details which Hevvish stigmatises as the basis of `legend', but whose very absence of glam should guarantee their truth.

It is to misknow Martha Brown, wh' moral education from the age of ten 11 received from the Brontës themselves, doubt her truth. Descendants of the Bro family live today, and to those of us have had occasion to know them, the sisting traits of reliability, regard truth and honour, and dislike for 'humb are to be found in them that so eviden distinguished Martha; as the corresponde

a

a

of both Charlotte Brontë and her husband shows. Martha's evidence about Emily did not vary; if she said Emily baked the family read with a German book propped up beside her, it was so ; if Martha said Emily fed the animals as usual the night before she though she could hardly stand, Mr ewish need not doubt it. These are trivial cidents perhaps, like many others Martha emembered, but they show us the living mily better than the psychoanalysts can. Mr Hewish's suspicion of the spoken as tinct from the printed record deprives him f certain authentic sources of information at are irreplaceable. Because he has found o published record of the connection be- seen the Brontes and the Heaton family of 'onden House, to whose famous library I ave shown •in my books on Branwell and harlotte they had access, he says 'the ques- ion remains controversial'. The connection sufficiently proved by the correspondence f Mr Brontë with Mr Heaton with whom, s one of his Church Trustees, he had fre- uent parish business to transact. The letters, often carried by hand (as Mr Bronte had

o man servant, the messenger could well ave been Branwell) show on what footing f neighbourliness the two families lived. Mr Hewish is far more in his element in ose sections of his book that deal with mily Bronte's work. There he is at his most formative, his wide reading coming to his id—and ours—in finding the sources and

• mpathies that from childhood upward loured Emily's mind and informed her art. treating of the known influences of Scott, yron and Shakespeare on her imagery, he ther plays down the early impact of ordsworth on a young imagination tuned, it would seem, from birth to the ices of Nature, and almost altogether nores the major role of the Border Ballads supplying the terse dramatic forms and en the heroic names of Gonda].

Of especial interest, however, are Mr ewish's findings on the subject of Byron's print on the Brontë children; he suggests at their habit of keeping diary-notes was spired by his example as quoted in Moore's e, which they are known to have read fore 1834 when Emily's first diary-note as written. The relevance of Byron's agony mind when he overheard Mary Chaworth !ling her maid that she could not consider arrying 'that lame boy', and his headlong ght from Chaworth in consequence, to eathcliff's parallel experience after hear- s Cathy confide in Ellen, is germane in- ed. The Websterian devilry of Heathcliff ■ ards his dying son, and the markedly. akespearian language of the scene in hich he drives him upstairs to his death- d, are a valuable and apt comparison and ould seem to confirm Emily's recent read- g of Shakespeare which her allusion to ng Lear in the opening of Wuthering Fights suggests.

Of literary sources for many of the poems

d much of Wuthering Heights, Mr Nish is perhaps all too prodigal; to find arlowe behind the passage in Stars': 0 Stars, and Dreams and gentle Night; 0 Night and Stars return!

And hide me from the hostile light That does not warm, but burn — curdy to deny all direct inspiration to the ct literary and most primitive and instinc- e of English poets. In any case, the mood rejection of day in favour of night is nt in two other poems of the period that e no Marlowesque overtones.

If Mr Hewish errs in his estimate of Emily Brontë as a creative artist it is in ascrib- ing to exclusively literary origins—rather than to natural influences—the course of her intellectual development. He is at pains, for instance, to seek out examples from Scott and Edgworth for the use of narrators with- in a tale, as Emily elected to do in Wuthering Heights, when all the time he has at hand the most obvious prototype for Ellen Dean, and the only one likely to have influenced her choice, in old Tabby, the parsonage servant, whose racy memories of the region fifty years 'sine', are mentioned by Mrs Gasket!. From Tabby, with whom Emily frequently lived alone when her sisters and brother were from home, she learnt more of story-telling, of local characters, of the hill-farmers living within a mile of her home, men as savage and untamed as their animals and as the elements they learnt to defy from birth, than from all the books in Keighley library.

'Literary relatives of her characters are certainly easier to find than human originals', writes Mr Hewish. He forgets, perhaps, young Ellen Nussey's shuddering recollec- tions of the stories 'full of grim humour and interest' told by Mr Bronte at the breakfast- table to a highly appreciative family audience. Ellen herself saw the relation be- tween Emily's familiarity with such charac- ters and the protagonists of her tale. Wuthering Heights has never presented any problem to readers in the region; they are familiarised with such ways. A successor to Mr Bronte in the ministry of Haworth was called in one day by the wife of a hill- fanner to protest at the installation in her home of his 'fancy-woman'. Standing be- tween the rivals to his favours, the grinning farmer answered the parson's homily with a gesture: 'Look at un, Parson,' he said, 'can ye blame me for choosing that un?' designating the object of his latest choice.

The isolation and loneliness of Emily Bronte's home were as much an essential requisite to the mystic experiences she sought —and sometimes blissfully achieved—as all the little learning she commanded. This is not to say she was not as well—probably far better—educated as other women of her class and time; but learning was not an end

with her (as it certainly was with Charlotte). Of the real occupation of her time and the purpose of her writing—of that pursuit of union with the Absolute and the attempt to record 'the fleeting treacheries' of the visions vouchsafed her at painfully rare intervals— Mr Hewish is very chary of mention. His analysis of the famous passage 'Then dawns the Invisible' etc, is couched in psycho- analytic terms; and it is characteristic of his refusal to take a personal stand on any but the safest ground. Of the invisible side of his subject—of that 'dark side of the moon' in Emily Brontë—he will not speak, or attempt to follow her, and leaves those who dare to do so to risk blinding by the surrounding radiance.