Table of contents:
- Six talents in one family
- Joint creativity and ideological disputes
- Where does optimism come from?
- Three sisters disguised as three brothers
- Gone beyond the storm pass
Video: 30 years of life, one romance and a sea of sadness: The fate of Emily Brontë, who won worldwide fame only after her death
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
July 30 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the English writer Emily Brontë. This woman, who lived a short life - only 30 years, went down in history, first of all, as the author of the novel "Wuthering Heights", and also as the sister of two more, no less famous writers Charlotte and Anne Bronte and poet and artist Patrick Branwell Bronte.
Six talents in one family
The Brontë family can be called unique in terms of the number of literary gifted people who grew up in it. The head of the family, the Anglican priest Patrick Bronte, wrote poetry and stories, and his wife Maria Branwell created a religious and philosophical treatise, which, however, was never published. They had six children in total - five daughters and a son, but the two older girls, Elizabeth and Maria, died when they were ten and eleven years old. The other four, as early as childhood, began to compose different stories, and even then it was clear that they all inherited the creative abilities of their parents.
Joint creativity and ideological disputes
Emily Bronte was the fifth child, Charlotte and Patrick Branwell were older than her, and Anne was two years younger. It was with her younger sister that she developed a particularly close relationship: as a child, Emily and Anne wrote together stories and poems about the country of Gondall they had invented, while the elders Charlotte and Patrick, also co-authored, wrote stories about the same fictional City of Glass.
Emily and Anne did not always get along with Charlotte - as is often the case with creative people, all three sisters had difficult characters, and each tried to prove to the others that she was more capable than them. Once Charlotte came up with a completely seditious thought for those times: why should the main heroines of romantic books be written beauties by all means? Most people are not very beautiful, most of the readers of romance novels have the usual "gray" appearance - so why not write a book about an equally not very beautiful heroine in which they could recognize themselves?
Charlotte shared this idea with the sisters, but they made fun of her, saying that no one would read such a book. And as it turned out later, they were mistaken, because Charlotte Bronte's novel "Jen Eyre" with the ugly protagonist is still read all over the world. However, if Emily and Anne hadn't laughed at their sister, she might not have written this book in spite of them, so indirectly the younger sisters of Brontë are also involved in its appearance.
But in disputes with his brother, the three sisters always acted as a united front. In his youth, Patrick Branwell sometimes expressed the idea that writing is not a woman's business and that love novels cannot be called serious literature. But the young man could not argue three indignant girls at once, and in the end, he admitted he was wrong. And later he went down in history not only as a poet, but also as an artist.
All his sisters also wrote poetry, but love novels brought them the greatest fame. Charlotte left behind four finished books and one unfinished one, Anne wrote two novels, and Emily only one, Wuthering Heights. This was the last literary work of the middle Brontë sister, completed shortly before her death. She did not have time to enjoy the fame that this novel received later.
Where does optimism come from?
Emily was the most pessimistic and gloomy person of all Brontë's children, and for good reason. She was the only one in the family who saw the death of two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. All three went to a private school, and it was at this time that there was an epidemic of tuberculosis. Maria and Elizabeth died, and seven-year-old Emily, miraculously not ill, remained with them until the end, and their death was a great shock for the girl.
The eldest Maria Bronte had already died by that time - Emily hardly remembered her. The father began to raise the remaining children, and thanks to him, all four received an excellent education. Emily and Charlotte studied for a while at another private school in England, and then in Brussels. However, Emily did not like to leave her home in the village of Hoert for a long time and was in a hurry to return there from all her trips. After completing her studies, she refused to go anywhere else, and only once was Anne's sister able to persuade her to go to York for a few days.
Three sisters disguised as three brothers
Emily wrote poetry almost all the time and at the same time did not like and, in her own words, did not know how to write letters. By 1846, she had accumulated a lot of poems that she considered successful, and the girl decided to publish them along with the poems of her sisters. And since the attitude towards female poetry was still not very serious, the Bronte sisters took male pseudonyms for themselves and called themselves the Bell brothers. The collection, Poems by Carrer, Ellis and Acton Bells, was a great success, and the most talented poems were written by "Brother Eliss," under whose name Emily was hiding.
Gone beyond the storm pass
A year later, Emily Bronte finished the novel Wuthering Heights - a dark, almost hopeless story about passionate love, hatred and a desire for revenge, which can be stronger than love and other bright feelings. And a year later, the author of this work was gone: Emily caught a cold at the funeral of her brother Patrick, who died of tuberculosis, and soon died from the same disease.
She was only thirty years old, and one can only guess how many more talented works, perhaps not as pessimistic as her first and only novel, she could create if she lived a long life.
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