Jane ’s Reviews > The Essence of the Brontës: A Compilation with Essays > Status Update

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.

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.