Status Updates From This Dark Night: Emily Bron...

‘1837—cruel measures criminalised poverty by making the poor work to receive help—forcing them to live in prison-like workhouses—brutalities of the class system—heavily colour her portrayal of Heathcliff—victim—who victimises others in his turn. It’s no surprise—she was composing violent—poetry. No doubt she ruminated on the future—the need to support herself—Working-class women—options—exhausting and poorly paid—’

‘M—travelling the world—in order to stay “outside the cage,” as she put it. Studying algebra because “it is odd for a woman to learn it—I like to establish my right to be doing odd things,” she recognised E’s wayward nature right away—when someone asked about her religion she would answer: “that is between God & me.” E, stretched out on the hearthrug with Keeper (bullmastiff, cross-breed), exclaimed: “That’s right”.’

‘—her intimacy with insomnia is writ large. Almost half of her poems of 1837 explore—how the speaker “could not sleep.” If fitful slumber does come, then it would “mould—Into some strange & spectral dream.” She often ridiculed Victorian sentimentalism & evangelical morality. Wild creatures with unyielding qualities attracted her. The idealisation of—the love of simpering lap dogs—subservient to humans—disgusted her.’

‘—playing became more instinctive, it nourished her, but her emotional closeness to animals came unbidden. Injured birds and homeless cats were brought into the house to nurse or keep or both. Once, she saw an unknown dog—he bit her arm—she rushed into the kitchen, grabbed an iron out of the fire, and seared the wound to burn out the infection. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of heath for her—’

‘People take on the terroir—as if they grow out of the ground, rooted. Where did life end, and death begin? This question would be omnipresent throughout—She was one of those ‘to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest.’ Don’t look away from pain, but stare at it unflinchingly, enter it, and linger there. Be haunted eternally. Purple auriculas, snowdrops, and crocuses began to flower—’

‘Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a biography of Charlotte that gave a portrait of E as—enigmatic—mostly unpleasant misanthrope. I present a portrait of a consummate artist—Fugitive, at odds w/ conventions—almost impossible to grasp—The past, whether geological / ancestral, is never laid to rest—The terrible beauty—the wuthering—of nature’s wrath—not to mention her—obsession with spirits, & objects reappearing from long ago—’