Last Things: Emily Brontë's Poems

by Janet Gezari

At present, Emily Brontë's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Batille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Brontë had a mystical experience because she "reached the very essence of such an experience." Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her
poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. For admirers of Wuthering Heights , Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

200 pages, Hardcover

First published February 22, 2007

Reviews

[Anna Christensen Spydell · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the stars. Every star. Gezari isn’t just brilliant, she’s luminous.

[Ellen Swan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but I feel Gezari misses some obvious connections:

1. She talks about nursing/mothering imagery and the anguish of facing loss with regards to death in Bronte's poetry. I thought it was worth connecting to the fact that Patrick Bronte said his wife didn't die "like a Christian," secure in the love Christ and assured of her own salvation, but was griefstricken at the idea of leaving her children motherless--the servants said she repeatedly cried, "Oh, my poor children," in her final illness. Emily would've been three when her mother passed--surely, that was when she made the connection between the loss imparted by death and mothering imagery.

2. Gezari talks about a "Bronte word kitty," and compares frequency of certain words in Emily work to that of Branwell, Charlotte, and even Patrick. But why not Anne? Anne was the sibling Emily was closest to. Gondal was their joint creation--wouldn't Anne be the obvious point of comparison?

[Lisa Blosfelds · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me hate Charlotte Bronte as is reveals how she altered Emily's poems to make her seem to conform to Victorian ideals of femininity ie docile, devout and domesticated. Not only did she change the poems, editing, rewriting and adding additional verses to them, but she also destroyed many manuscripts and personal papers to make Emily more acceptable to her contemporaries who found her coarse and blasphemous in having an independent mind, thus making it difficult for those whose ideals are not Victorian to see Emily as she truly was.

Janet Gezari gives valuable insights into the poems but at times her language becomes over technical and I think she finds more in them that was originally intended. It is this obscurity and over analysis that stops me giving the book five stars rather than the four I have given it. However, given the relative dearth of books analysing Emily's poems this is worth reading by those who are interested in more that Wuthering Heights. However, the technical language of literary criticism which Gezari uses means that it is not a book for the casual reader.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

nothing like a good piece of scholarship to remind you how much you've regressed since your school days. <>. it was well written, and her explications were good, but i couldn't agree with some of her theories and conclusions. i'm also not particularly fond of dealing with emily bronte's life in relation to her poetry, or vice versa, and while this book was pretty good about keeping them separate, there were parts when she wandered into the realm of biographical information to help find meaning/reason. but i enjoyed it.

[Ben Lovegrove · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable and readable book about Emily's poems

[Amani]

nice book