Women in history: Emily Brontë, the right to be a writer

chi wrote the masterpiece Wuthering Heights? Emily Jane Brontë, full stop. For many years it has been put in doubt that she was the author of the text, also because in 1847in the middle of the Victorian era, when women only had to represent a type of femininity centered on motherhood and the family, the writer chose to publish the novel under the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell.

Emily Brontë recognized only after death

It was only in the second edition, which came out after Emily’s death, that she was credited as the author. However, this legitimacy has been questioned over the years by many critics who tended to attribute the work even to his brother, Branwell Brontë. Rachel McCarthy and James O’Sullivan, researchers at the University of Oxford, thought about putting an end to the matter.

In their essay titled Who wrote Wuthering Heights? (Who wrote Wuthering Heights?”), published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (academic.oup.com), the “motherhood” is recognized without a shadow of a doubt to Emily.

To get to the verdict a rather complex technique was used which analyzes the style, those unique characteristics that each author or authoress has, thanks to algorithms applied to language, to favorite words, to interlayers. After all, behind a sentence like: «Only the restless know how difficult it is to survive the storm and not be able to live without itthere could only be a woman.

At the home of the Brontë sisters

Emily was the most famous of the three Brontë sisters, all with a passion for writing. The fifth of six children, she was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, Yorkshire and died early of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848 at Haworth, village nestled in the moorlands of northern England.

The family moved there in 1820, where the father worked as a perpetual curate. It was in this austere and remote place that the children had their training, with a rigid and religious upbringing from which they could only escape with fantasy games and adventurous stories that they invented themselves or that they heard every night from “Tabby,” the housekeeper hired to care for the little ones after their mother’s untimely death. Games, readings, stories and fantasies that were also a source of inspiration for writing compositions and poems. The family represented in the life of the Brontë sisters a fundamental element of support and sharing of ideas.

Emily Brontë at the cinema

In the autumn of 1845, her sister Charlotte found one of Emily’s notebooks and was so impressed by her verses that she thought about publishing a volume that collected the works of all the sisters. In 1846 the text (signed with a pseudonym) came out with the title Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Only two copies were sold, but Ellis (aka Emily) received flattering reviews. Emily, shy, shy and solitary, had no great desire to make her writings known to the public, unlike the other Brontë brothers. She was the sister closest to the moor and to her paternal home, so much so that she lived there for all the thirty years of her life, except for very short periods away.

Wuthering Heights it did not please the critics of the time. It tells the tormented love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine and the repercussions on the people around the protagonists. A work imbued with themes such as love, hate, desire for revengeonly later considered one of the highest masterpieces of English literature.

Voices in the storm

The story has as its backdrop the small town of Haworth, which today has become the destination of literary tourism. Many people come from all over to enter the house where the family lived, transformed into a museum by the Brontë Society which has recreated the atmosphere of the time while preserving the original objects (bronte.org.uk).

In Haworth you can also visit the Anglican church St Michael and All Angels’ Church, the parish where his father was curate and where the family tomb is located, and the Black Bull, the pub where the chair used to sit on is kept by his brother Branwell, who fell into the spiral of alcoholism and died at 31 .

Around it is the windy and wild moor, where a path of a few kilometers has also been traced between the places dear to Emily (wuthering-heights.co.uk). As observed by Nadia Fusini, writer, literary critic, translator, scholar of comparative literature and author of Nomi. Eleven writings to women (Donzelli editore): «It is difficult for anyone who has seen it to forget their house, and that cemetery: the cold and dampness of the moors, that solitude, which more properly should be called enclosure. If it is true that we should never resort to the author’s life to interpret his work and if it is true that the writer’s life teaches us nothing, it is also true that if we knew how to read it we would find everything in it, because it is inscribed as a figure in the work”.

And it is precisely from the “evil of living” that this novel with a complex structure comes to life, built like a matryoshka, where one story leads to another. That it is a love novel is undeniable but, as he defined it Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s sister and author of Jane Eyre, is also a work «wild and gnarled like a heather root».

The novel has had several television transpositions (in Italy the 1956 Rai script with Massimo Girotti and Anna Maria Ferrero, directed by Mario Landi was very popular) and cinematographic. The first was that of 1939, directed by William Wyler, starring Laurence Olivier, in the role of the tormented Heathcliff, and Merle Oberon in those of Cathy. It received eight Oscar nominations and won the one for best cinematography. Then, in 1954, it was released in theaters Abismos de passion, by Luis Buñuel, set in Mexico, but respecting the passages of the novel. The director chose the notes of Tristan and Isolt, the musical drama by Richard Wagner, as accompaniment for some scenes in the film. And, indeed, those notes well interpret the Sturm und Drang, the storm and the impetus, of the two protagonists.

Cathy’s ghost climbs the hit parade

Staying on the musical theme, it is impossible not to remember the song by Catherine Bush, aka Kate, which with its ethereal and sensual Wuthering Heightsfrom 1978, climbed the top of the charts by interpreting in its verses the gothic atmospheres of Emily Brontë that had scandalized the Victorian era: Cathy’s ghost returns to fix things, possess Heathcliff’s soul and take it away after a long time to pine after so much loneliness in the afterlife.

The Loneliness of Emily Brontë

Few testimonies remain of Emily: she had no friends, wrote no letters, left no diaries; we get some hint of her inner life and her personality only from the diaries and letters of her sister Charlotte, from which it transpires that the character of the stubborn Shirley, protagonist of Charlotte’s novel of the same name, is modeled on the real figure of Emily. Emily’s death occurred three months after her brother’s disappearancein a silent suffering in the refusal of doctors and medicines.

Wuthering Heights still current 176 years later

But why Does your book like and continue to like despite 176 years having passed since its publication? Many psychoanalysts, literary critics, linguists, historians, biographers have given an answer. And, among these, since of Wuthering Heights a drawn version could not be missing, there is also that of cartoonist Sean Michael Wilson. His Wuthering Heights: the Graphic Novel Quick Text is a reissue for quick reading accompanied by comics. In the introduction Wilson comments: “Deprivation, madness, cruelty, frustrated love and ghosts: what more could you want from a book?”.

A strict Victorian family

At the cinema the biography of the author of Wuthering Heights

It is showing in cinemas Emily, biotopic dedicated to Emily Brontë. It was featured in the 2022 Toronto Film Festival Official Selection (tiff.net/events/emily), lasts 130 minutes and is the directorial debut of Frances O’Connor, Australian actress and screenwriter who chose Emma Mackey as the protagonist, known for her role as Maeve Wiley in the television series Sex Education. The director wanted to emphasize the subjection of women in an oppressive patriarchy, many of the obstacles that stood between Emily Brontë and self-fulfillment were the result of a deeply rooted sexism. A film that tells her story, the too short life of the writer, and reminds us that her struggle is not over yet.

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