Emily Brontë

by Lyn Pykett

Emily BrontI's writings explore, expand, and transgress limited nineteenth-century ideas of the nature of the female lot and of women's creativity. This study offers an extensive rereading of the poems which focuses on Emily BrontI's problematic relationship to the Romantic tradition in which they were produced, and to the critical tradition in which they have been reproduced. Using recent feminist work on gender and genre Lyn Pykett throws fresh light on the complexities of Wuthering Heights, and suggests that much of this novel's distinctiveness may be attributed to the particular ways in which it both combines and explores Female Gothic and the emerging realist domestic novel, a genre also widely used and read by women. Emily A Life Hidden from History; The Writings of Ellis Bell; "Not at all like the poetry women generally write" Emily BrontI and the Problem of the Woman Poet; Death Dreams and Prison Songs; Gender and Genre in DEGREESR Wuthering Heights; Changing the The Two Catherines; Nelly Memoirs of a Survivor; The Male Part of the Poem; Reading Women's Emily BrontI and the Critic

Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Edwin John Moorhouse Marr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting little book offering a detailed, feminist re-appraisal of Emily Brontë's work. It offered some intriguing insights, such as the discussion of the 'prison' trope in EB's poetry, and it anticipated queer theory through its analysis of gender in Wuthering Heights. However, the book's ardent feminist standpoint was both its strength and its weakness. I really enjoyed the last chapter, offering a chronological overview into how EB has been critically received from her own time, to the mid/late 20th century, but Pykett offers some critical viewpoints I find questionable. For instance, her argument that Gondal was a world created to make up for the lack of historical education for the Brontë sisters, when in reality the girls had full and free access to the library at the Parsonage, as well as the library at Ponden. Also, Pykett's glosses over Catherine's death in WH, just suggesting she 'died in childbirth,' rather than acknowledging the death as a form of suicide, a self-wasting in a parallel to Heathcliff's own decline.

[A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and insightful.