Emily Brontë: Heretic

by Stevie Davies

A look at the life and times of one of Britain's most intriguing and exceptional women writers.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Literature, Biography Memoir, Feminism

274 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

Welsh born Stevie Davies is a novelist, literary critic, biographer and historian. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Academi Gymreig and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! How deep can you go when analyzing someone??? Emily Bronte is my favorite person in that if I could bring back to life someone famous so I could probe their mind, it would be her. She is my favorite poet along with Edgar Allen Poe. Let’s just say a huge part of my need to understand her was quenched by Davies' book. Davies turned Emily upside down & inside OUT!! It's all too complicated for me to repeat even a sniplet, but I got it - I got it! Let’s just say I feel like I got a semester's worth of psychology, literature, and storytelling classes centered on Emily Bronte. The metaphor of the life below, the roots dying under the earth, the same life that is green & living up above......anyway, this book can be tough at times as it goes sooooo deeeeep. However, when I sat there & thought about how lucky I was that a book existed to this degree regarding a subject I'm so interested in, I picked it right back up. Thank you Stevie Davies!

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stevie Davies' "Emily Bronte: Heretic" is an incredibly insightful and fascinatingly written analysis of Emily Jane's work and (to a smaller extent) life. That Davies is a novelist lends to this critical work a highly accessible and interesting style. She attempts to dispel some of the myths about Bronte--namely those of her as hermited virgin, suicidal misanthropist, and amateur. The chapters on double-readings in Wuthering Heights and Bronte's fascination with animals v. human nature are probably the most intriguing. I'm in the process of writing a final paper on WH, and Davies' text really helped to illuminate a lot of things in the novel that I hadn't thought of before in my (many many) readings of it. Her look to the "one soul" of Cathy and Heathcliff, in particular, was provocative and incredibly detailed/evolved. The last chapter on Bronte's final days really challenged the conceptions of her as outside of reality; Davies attempts to raise awareness of Bronte's works (particularly her Gondal poems) as engaging with the world strife around her. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys Wuthering Heights, biographies, the Brontes, or simply a fascinating and feminist-leaning critical essay.

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

As this is Emily Bronte's bicentenary, this book ought to be a must read. The book offers a penetrating reading of EB from a feminist and human perspective. The left-hand psychological aspect is fascinating. This book is superlative literary criticism written by an author who is empathetic with EB and the natural world. Stevie Davies reads Wuthering Heights almost as a sustained poem, listening to the internal rhymes, alliteration and patterns that appear in EB's prose. This is an illuminating study that repays close and considered reading.

[Hannah Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't have enough words to describe how great this book is, but the author definitely does. This book may very well be the most monumental every written on Emily. It feels as if the author knows her and I can practically feel Emily hovering over my shoulder as I read this, nodding her head with approval. Emily was a complex woman and far from simplifying her, this novel embraces the enigma that she is while seeking to bring us closer to her. It made me, already an ardent Emily fan, fall even more in love with her than ever. After just having read a book on the Shelley's I can't help but think they would have absolutely loved her, she might well have been another muse for Percy. If there was a way to go back in time and arrange it so that they met who knows what fascinating things might have transpired. But alas! Emily was born too late to have been a character in the drama that was their lives. This book marks for me the start of a goal to read as many of the very best bios on Emily currently in publication, in an attempt, not only to find the best ones, but to understand even better this remarkable human being.
ETA: For the convience of others who may be interested I have devised a ranking system that will follow each review on every bio I read so it may be easier to determine which might be the most appealing to their individual needs. I will be evaluating its merits in four separate categories
Literary Efforts/Poetry/Wuthering Heights
*****
Mysticism/psychoanalysis/sexuality
*****
The Early Years/Juvenilia and Gondal years
***
Abroad in Brussels
****
Home Life/Domesticity
****

21/25 points

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Davies does have SOME good insights here, in places. She brings a few nuggets of biography I didn't know before, and her translation, from French into English, of the two short essays Emily Bronte wrote for Monsieur Heger were useful for those of us unable to access the originals. However, in many ways this is a far too rambling rendition of Davies's subjective interpretations of Emily to suit herself - a danger of course in all literary criticism and history and biography writing. Davies does this in places without subtlety or nuance, to the point she portrays Bronte as some sort of Neo-Darwinian Eugenicist, and ends up contradicting herself in places too (especially around Emily Bronte's relationship with 'religion'), without reconciling the problems of historically contextual complexity, including incomplete history/biography details, that might cause such contradictions in her writing. One major problem is, like most others, Davies fails to understand the key significance of Isabella (née Linton) Heathcliff's narration in the novel. Here again I cannot recommend too highly Judith Pike's 2009 essay in the journal "Nineteenth Century Literature" as a key counterpoint to much of the Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte 'analysis' out there.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davies' exploration of the life of Emily Bronte as well as her writings made for a fascinating read. Using Bronte's Brussels essays, poetry, and "Wuthering Heights", Davies pieces together theories about the motivations and influences that drove Bronte to create her powerful and enigmatic novel. Her arguments are insightful and expository, but respectful of the life of a writer on whom we can speculate but never truly know.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant, original reading of Emily Bronte's work - captured her unique genius with courage & imagination

[Nada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant reading of Wuthering Heights.

[Sandy Lender · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't get the impression that Mr. Davies did much research for this book, or took proper time to edit it for his audience. Much of the information was rehashed from sources I had already read or cited for papers of my own in college. The volume is put together like a self-published vanity book that his university refused to recognize as valid literary or research work and his theories don't hold much weight when you consider Emily's stringent religious upbringing, etc. This isn't the place to pick apart his theories, but to suggest the work is neither credible nor well-presented. I can't recommend the book to other readers.

[Velvetink]

May be interesting, people seem to have radically oppositional views about it.