N0TES

Wuthering Heights

‌Quoted in Juliet Barker, The Brontë s (London: Phoenix, 1995), p. 271.
‌The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, eds. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1934), III, p. 5.
‌Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857; rpt. London: Dent, 1971), p. 258 and p. 184.
‌Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 151.
‌Edward Chitham highlights this paucity of information in his A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) by scrupulously separating out fact from fiction.
‌Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, pp. 184–5.
‌Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 81 and p. 115.
‌Raymond Williams, The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence (St Albans: Paladin, 1974), p. 8 and p. 11.
‌G. H. Lewes, Leader, 28 December, 1850, quoted in Miriam Allott (ed.), Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights A Casebook (London: Macmillan, Revised Edition, 1992), p. 64. This edition provides a valuable selection of contemporary reviews.
‌Such claims were anticipated by C. P. Sanger’s ground-breaking monograph, The Structure of Wuthering Heights (London: Hogarth Press, 1926).
‌For further details see Further Reading (p. xxxvi).
‌Michael Macovski, ‘Wuthering Heights and the Rhetoric of Interpretation’, ELH, 54 (1987), p. 366.
‌James Kincaid, ‘Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), pp. 781–802.
‌Frank Kermode, ‘A Modern Way with a Classic’, New Literary History, V (Spring 1974), p. 434.
‌Henry James, Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 133.
‌See, for example, James Kavanagh in Emily Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) who suggests that Heathcliff has an Irish working class heritage.
‌In this state the infant imagines a condition of absolute unity in the dyadic relation to the mother, in which no distinction exists between self and other, or subject and object. In order to achieve subjecthood, the infant must come to recognize itself as separate, as part not whole. In other words, in order to occupy the ‘I’ position, the infant must recognize the existence of that which is not-I. Lacan argues that a significant step in this process occurs with the mirror phase, when the infant comes to recognize its reflection in the mirror (either the literal mirror or the ‘reflection’ of the self given back to the infant by the perceptions of others).
‌In fact, Lacan suggests it is an ‘eternal and irreducible human desire… for the nonrelationship of zero, where identity is meaningless’. Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: the Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 191.
‌As outlined, for example, by the French feminist theorist, Luce Irigaray:
Love is either the mode of becoming which appropriates the other to itself by consuming it, introjecting it into the self until it the self disappears. Or love is the movement of becoming that allows the one and the other to grow. For such love to exist, each one must keep its body autonomous. One must not be the source of the other, nor the other of the one. Two lives must embrace and fecundate each other with no preconceived goal or end for either.

Luce Irigaray, Passion élémentaires (1982), trans. Elizabeth Grosz in S*xual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 170.
‌For an illuminating discussion of the transgressive power of each genre see Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981) and Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
‌See especially Elizabeth Napier, ‘The Problem of Boundaries in Wuthering Heights’, Philological Quarterly 63 (1984), pp. 95–107. Also Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart, 1953).
‌See Frank Kermode. ‘A Modern Way with a Classic’, p. 420.
‌Infact, the corpse can be seen as the ultimate transgressor, spanning the boundaries between life and death, as Julia Kristeva has noted: ‘The corpse seen without God, and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object.’ Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
‌Edward Chitham notes just such qualities in Emily Brontë’s poetry: ‘Emily states, she does not compare. What is more, she states contradictory thoughts or feelings in adjacent poems’. A Life of Emily Brontë, p. 202.
‌David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (1934; rpt. London: Constable, 1960), p. 167.
‌Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 271.
‌Elizabeth Grosz, S*xual Subversions, p. 71.

‌Further Reading‌

REFERENCE

Gazari, Janet (ed.), Emily Brontë. The Complete Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. An excellent and readily available edition.

Roper, Derek with Chitham, Edward (eds.), The Poems of Emily Brontë, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. The definitive scholarly edition of Brontë’s poetry.

Wise, T. J. and Symington, J. A. (eds.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, 4 vols., Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1933. The most useful and complete primary source for Brontë letters.

BI 0GRAPHY AND BACKGR 0UND

Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, London: Phoenix Giants, 1994. Comprehensive biography of the Brontë family by former Curator and Librarian of the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Chitham, Edward, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë at Work, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1998. Makes the most of sketchy information to offer insight into the writing of Wuthering Heights – its sources, composition history and relationship to Emily Brontë’s poetry.

Chitham, Edward, A Life of Emily Brontë, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. A scrupulous account which carefully distinguishes between fact, speculation and fiction.

Gaskell, Elizabeth, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, London: Dent, 1974. The pioneering classic of Brontë biography written by Charlotte’s friend and

fellow novelist, which provides a sympathetic and engaging contemporary account.

Miller, Lucasta, The Brontë Myth, London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. A fresh and astute examination of the whole industry that has grown up around Brontë biography.

CRITICISM

Allott, Miriam (ed.), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Casebook), London: Macmillan, 1970. A collection of critical responses to Wuthering Heights which provides a useful historical overview of fashions and prejudices in criticism.

Allott, Miriam (ed.), The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. A valuable collection of contemporary reviews of the Brontës’ work.

Bloom, Harold (ed.), Modern Critical Views: The Brontës, New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Collects a range of important essays, representing a broad spectrum of critical perspectives.

Davies, Stevie, Emily Brontë, Brighton: Harvester, 1988. Interprets Wuthering Heights as a defiant assertion of the primacy of the anarchic, uncensored, egotistic ‘theatre of childhood’.

Davies, Stevie, Emily Brontë (Writers and Their Work), Plymouth, UK: Northcote House, 1998. A lively and contentious reading of both the novel and the novelist, arguing that the book is marked at once by a drive toward comprehension and a resistance to interpretation.

Eagleton, Terry, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, London: Macmillan, 1975. Some distortion takes place in the interests of an ideological reading but remains interesting as the first Marxist study of the Brontës.

Glen, Heather (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. A range of contemporary essays

provides useful literary and historical context.

Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale, 1979. Early feminist account reads the novel as a rebellious retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost in which notions of heaven and hell are reversed.

Homans, Margaret, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986. Uses psychoanalytic theory to argue that the novel presents two contrasting stories of female development in the figures of the older and younger Catherines and thus two contrasting myths of women’s possible relation to language.

Kavanagh, James,Emily Brontë, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. An intently ideological reading, focusing on the changing nature of family and class relations at a time of economic crisis.

Miles, Peter, The Critics Debate: Wuthering Heights, London: Macmillan, 1990. A good starting point for a simple introduction to a variety of critical approaches to the novel.

Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the Uncanny’ in Fiction and Repetition in Seven English Novels, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982, 43–71. One of the earliest and best applications of poststructuralist theory to the novel, focusing on the uncanny and the resistance to interpretation.

Paglia, Camille, S*xual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. A contentious analysis which argues that Wuthering Heights represents the triumph of nature over history and stresses the incestuous and sadomasochistic aspects of the novel.

Pykett, Lyn, Emily Brontë, London: Macmillan, 1989. Examines the novel in the context of competing genres such as Gothic, folk, and Victorian domestic realism.

Sanger, Charles P., The Structure of Wuthering Heights, London: Hogarth Press, 1926. (Reprinted in Allott). Highlights the craftmanship of the novel – its sophisticated structure and careful chronology.

Stoneman, Patsy (ed.), Wuthering Heights (Macmillan New Casebook), Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Useful collection of recent interpretations, representing a range of theoretical approaches, with a helpful Introduction.

Tayler, Irene, Holy Ghosts: The Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Examines the artistic development of the two sisters in relation to their creation of a male muse.

‌A Note on the Text‌

Neither the original manuscript nor any part of a draft of Wuthering Heights is known to exist. Editors, then, are faced with a choice between the first and second editions of the text. In the first edition, published in December 1847 by Thomas Newby, the novels of Emily and Anne Brontë appeared together as Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Vols. I and II) with Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Vol. III). The second edition, published after Emily and Anne’s deaths, was edited by Charlotte Brontë and included her ‘Editor’s Preface’ and a ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’ (both reprinted here).

Both editions present problems for the student of the text. The first is notoriously unreliable. Shortly after its appearance Charlotte wrote to her publisher, W. S. Williams at Smith, Elder & Co., lamenting, ‘The books are not well got up – they abound in errors of the press.’1 She subsequently elaborated, ‘The orthography and punctuation of the books are mortifying to a degree: almost all the errors that were corrected in the proofsheets appear intact in what should have been the fair copies. If Mr Newby always does business in this way, few authors would like to have him for their publisher a second time.’2‌

Determined to make amends, Charlotte made considerable changes to the second edition of Emily’s novel. However, she was not content simply to correct typographical errors. She also changed the paragraphing to eliminate the prevalence of short paragraphs, altered the punctuation, tending to regularize Emily’s rather idiosyncratic style, and modified the rendering of Joseph’s dialect in order to make it more comprehensible: ‘I am sure Southerns must find it unintelligible.’3

Over time Charlotte’s second edition of Wuthering Heights has fallen from favour, and most modern editions now take the first edition as their starting point. This edition does likewise and aims to produce a text as close

as possible to the original edition, amending only the obvious printing errors.

N 0TES

‌The Brontës: Their Lives: Friendships and Correspondence, 4 vols., eds.

T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1933), II,

p. 162.
‌The Brontës, II, p. 165.
‌The Brontës, III, p. 165.

‌Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell‌‌‌

It has been thought that all the works published under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, were, in reality, the production of one person.1 This mistake I endeavoured to rectify by a few words of disclaimer prefixed to the third edition of Jane Eyre. These, too, it appears, failed to gain general credence, and now, on the occasion of a reprint of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, I am advised distinctly to state how the case really stands.

Indeed, I feel myself that it is time the obscurity attending those two names – Ellis and Acton – was done away. The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest; circumstances are changed. It becomes, then, my duty to explain briefly the origin and authorship of the books written by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

About five years ago, my two sisters and myself, after a somewhat prolonged period of separation, found ourselves reunited, and at home. Resident in a remote district where education had made little progress, and where, consequently, there was no inducement to seek social intercourse beyond our own domestic circle, we were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life.2 The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition; formerly we used to show each other what we wrote, but of late years this habit of communication and consultation had been discontinued; hence it ensued, that we were mutually ignorant of the progress we might respectively have made.

One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me, – a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I

thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating.

My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication. I knew, however, that a mind like hers could not be without some latent spark of honourable ambition, and refused to be discouraged in my attempts to fan that spark to flame.

Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own compositions, intimating that since Emily’s had given me pleasure, I might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge, yet I thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own.

We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors.

This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency: it took the character of a resolve. We agreed to arrange a small selection of our poems, and, if possible, get them printed. Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.

The bringing out of our little book was hard work. As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted; but for this we had been prepared at the outset; though inexperienced ourselves, we had read the experience of others. The great puzzle lay in the difficulty of getting answers of any kind from the publishers to whom we applied. Being greatly

harassed by this obstacle, I ventured to apply to the Messrs Chambers, of Edinburgh, for a word of advice; they may have forgotten the circumstance, but I have not, for from them I received a brief and business-like, but civil and sensible reply, on which we acted, and at last made a way.

The book was printed: it is scarcely known,3 and all of it that merits to be known are the poems of Ellis Bell. The fixed conviction I held, and hold, of the worth of these poems has not indeed received the confirmation of much favourable criticism; but I must retain it notwithstanding.

Ill-success failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued. We each set to work on a prose tale: Ellis Bell produced Wuthering Heights, Acton Bell, Agnes Grey, and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative in one volume. These mss. were perseveringly obtruded upon various publishers for the space of a year and a half; usually, their fate was an ignominious and abrupt dismissal.

At last Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted on terms somewhat impoverishing to the two authors; Currer Bell’s book found acceptance nowhere, nor any acknowledgment of merit, so that something like the chill of despair began to invade his heart. As a forlorn hope, he tried one publishing house more – Messrs Smith and Elder. Ere long, in a much shorter space than that on which experience had taught him to calculate – there came a letter, which he opened in the dreary expectation of finding two hard hopeless lines, intimating that Messrs Smith and Elder ‘were not disposed to publish the ms.,’ and, instead, he took out of the envelope a letter of two pages. He read it trembling. It declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly- expressed acceptance would have done. It was added, that a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention.

I was then just completing Jane Eyre, at which I had been working while the one volume tale was plodding its weary round in London: in three weeks I sent it off; friendly and skilful hands took it in. This was in the

commencement of September 1847; it came out before the close of October following, while Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, my sisters’ works, which had already been in the press for months, still lingered under a different management.

They appeared at last. Critics failed to do them justice. The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognized; its import and nature were misunderstood; the identity of its author was misrepresented; it was said that this was an earlier and ruder attempt of the same pen which had produced Jane Eyre. Unjust and grievous error! We laughed at it at first, but I deeply lament it now. Hence, I fear, arose a prejudice against the book. That writer who could attempt to palm off an inferior and immature production under cover of one successful effort, must indeed be unduly eager after the secondary and sordid result of authorship, and pitiably indifferent to its true and honourable meed. If reviewers and the public truly believed this, no wonder that they looked darkly on the cheat.

Yet I must not be understood to make these things subject for reproach or complaint; I dare not do so; respect for my sister’s memory forbids me. By her any such querulous manifestation would have been regarded as an unworthy, and offensive weakness.

It is my duty, as well as my pleasure, to acknowledge one exception to the general rule of criticism. One writer,4 endowed with the keen vision and fine sympathies of genius, has discerned the real nature of Wuthering Heights, and has, with equal accuracy, noted its beauties and touched on its faults. Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the ‘writing on the wall,’5 and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation. We have a right to rejoice when a true seer comes at last, some man in whom is an excellent spirit, to whom have been given light, wisdom, and understanding; who can accurately read the ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ of an original mind (however unripe, however inefficiently cultured and‌

partially expanded that mind may be); and who can say with confidence, ‘This is the interpretation thereof.’6

Yet even the writer to whom I allude shares the mistake about the authorship, and does me the injustice to suppose that there was equivoque in my former rejection of this honour (as an honour, I regard it). May I assure him that I would scorn in this and in every case to deal in equivoque; I believe language to have been given us to make our meaning clear, and not to wrap it in dishonest doubt.

‌The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Acton Bell, had likewise an unfavourable reception. At this I cannot wonder. The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer’s nature could be conceived. The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid. She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm.7 She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (Of course with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations) as a warning to others. She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften, or conceal. This well-meant resolution brought on her misconstruction and some abuse; which she bore, as it was her custom to bear whatever was unpleasant, with mild, steady patience. She was a very sincere and practical Christian, but the tinge of religious melancholy communicated a sad shade to her brief, blameless life.

Neither Ellis nor Acton allowed herself for one moment to sink under want of encouragement; energy nerved the one, and endurance upheld the other. They were both prepared to try again; I would fain think that hope and the sense of power was yet strong within them. But a great change approached: affliction came in that shape which to anticipate is dread; to

look back on, grief. In the very heat and burden of the day, the labourers failed over their work.

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep- branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render.

Two cruel months of hope and fear passed painfully by, and the day came at last when the terrors and pains of death were to be undergone by this treasure, which had grown dearer and dearer to our hearts as it wasted before our eyes. Towards the decline of that day, we had nothing left of Emily but her mortal remains as consumption left them. She died December 19, 1848.

We thought this enough: but we were utterly and presumptuously wrong.

She was not buried ere Anne fell ill. She had not been committed to the grave a fortnight, before we received distinct intimation that it was necessary to prepare our minds to see the younger sister go after the elder. Accordingly, she followed in the same path with slower steps, and with a patience that equalled the other’s fortitude. I have said that she was religious, and it was by leaning on those Christian doctrines in which she firmly believed, that she found support through her most painful journey. I witnessed their efficacy in her latest hour and greatest trial, and must bear

my testimony to the calm triumph with which they brought her through. She died May 28, 1849.

What more shall I say about them? I cannot and need not say much more. In externals, they were two unobtrusive women; a perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits. In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.

Anne’s character was milder and more subdued; she wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was wellendowed with quiet virtues of her own. Long-suffering, selfdenying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feeling, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted. Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.

This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil.

CURRER BELL

September 19, 1850

‌Editor’s Preface to the New [1850] Edition of Muthering Heights‌

I have just read over Wuthering Heights, and, for the first time, have obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people – to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West-Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.

To all such Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the north of England can for them have no interest; the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts, must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and – where intelligible – repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps, naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by mentors as harsh as themselves. A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only – a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologize; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however

well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does – what feeling it spares – what horror it conceals.

With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights, I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character. Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise. Had Ellis Bell been a lady or a gentleman accustomed to what is called ‘the world,’ her view of a remote and unreclaimed region, as well as of the dwellers therein, would have differed greatly from that actually taken by the homebred country girl. Doubtless it would have been wider – more comprehensive: whether it would have been more original or more truthful is not so certain. As far as the scenery and locality are concerned, it could scarcely have been so sympathetic: Ellis Bell did not describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the heather, their produce. Her descriptions, then, of natural scenery, are what they should be, and all they should be.

Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is different. I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates. My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious, circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them; knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued that what her mind had

gathered of the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more powerful than sportive, found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree; loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects, it was not amenable.

Having avowed that over much of Wuthering Heights there broods ‘a horror of great darkness’ that, in its storm-heated and electrical atmosphere, we seem at times to breathe lightning, let me point to those spots where clouded daylight and the eclipsed sun still attest their existence. For a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity, look at the character of Nelly Dean; for an example of constancy and tenderness, remark that of Edgar Linton. (Some people will think these qualities do not shine so well incarnate in a man as they would do in a woman, but Ellis Bell could never be brought to comprehend this notion: nothing moved her more than any insinuation that the faithfulness and clemency, the long-suffering and loving-kindness which are esteemed virtues in the daughters of Eve, become foibles in the sons of Adam. She held that mercy and forgiveness are the divinest attributes of the Great Being who made both man and woman, and that what clothes the Godhead in glory, can disgrace no form of feeble humanity.) There is a dry saturnine humour in the delineation of old Joseph, and some glimpses of grace and gaiety animate the younger

Catherine. Nor is even the first heroine of the name destitute of a certain strange beauty in her fierceness, or of honesty in the midst of perverted passion and passionate perversity.

Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition, from the time when ‘the little black- haired, swarthy thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil,’ was first unrolled out of the bundle and set on its feet in the farm-house kitchen, to the hour when Nelly Dean found the grim, stalwart corpse laid on its back in the panel-enclosed bed, with wide-gazing eyes that seemed ‘to sneer at her attempt to close them, and parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered too.’

Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius; a fire that might form the tormented centre – the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders. No; the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw – the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean. These solitary traits omitted, we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life – a Ghoul – an Afreet.

Whether it is right or advisable to create things like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master – something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent to ‘harrow the vallies, or be bound with a band in the furrow’ – when it ‘laughs at the multitude of the city, and regards not the crying of the driver’ -when, refusing absolutely to make ropes out of sea-sand any longer, it sets to work on statue-hewing, and you

have a Pluto or a Jove, a Tisiphone or a Psyche, a Mermaid or a Madonna, as Fate or Inspiration direct. Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you – the nominal artist – your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question – that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.

Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor: gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited the head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur – power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, halfrock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot.

CURRER BELL

[Charlotte Brontë]