Status Updates From The Essence of the Brontës ...

It was Swinburne who most exactly located the essence of Emily Brontë, and it was he who expressed it in the most concise terms: ‘There was a dark unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship in the passionate genius of Emily Brontë.’ Swinburne noted three of the most important factors in her work: her instinctiveness of a ‘dark unconscious’ order; her pantheism of primitive nature-worship; and her passion.

Sometimes when I wake in the morning, and know that Solitude, Remembrance, and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through, that at night I shall go to bed with them, that next morning I shall wake to them again; sometimes I have a heavy heart of it. But crushed I am not yet; nor robbed of elasticity, nor of hope, nor quite of endeavour. Still I have some strength to fight the battle of life.

I do not know whether you feel as I do, but there are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from what they used to be; something in me which used to be enthusiasm, is tamed down and broken.

It gives me sincere pleasure, my dear Ellen, to learn that you have at last found a few associates of congenial minds. I cannot conceive a life more dreary than that passed amidst sights, sounds, and companions all alien to the nature within us.

I am pleased that you are so fully convinced of my candour, for to know that you suspected me of a deficiency in this virtue would grieve and mortify me beyond expression. I do not derive any merit from the possession of it, for in me it is constitutional. Yet I think where it is possessed it will rarely exist alone, and where it is wanted there is reason to doubt the existence of almost every other virtue.