The publication history of and critical
response to
Wuthering Heights are intertwined with those of
Charlotte's
Jane Eyre and Anne's
Agnes Grey.
Wutheirng
Heights and
Agnes Grey were accepted for publication
before Charlotte had finished writing
Jane Eyre. However, their
publisher delayed bringing their novels out, with the result that
Jane
Eyre
was published first. It became a best seller. In an effort to cash in
on the success of
Jane Eyre, he implied that
Wuthering
Heights and
Agnes Grey were written by "the author
of
Jane Eyre"–to the distress of all three sisters. The
pseudonyms they had adopted unintentionally contributed to his
deception.
Wanting their works to be judged for their literary
merit and not on their authors' sex, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily
published their
novels under
names which which sounded masculine, Acton, Currer, and Ellis
Bell.
Preserving their male identities was so important to the Brontë
sisters
that Charlotte maintained that identity even in writing to her
publishers; for instance she described the Bells' beliefs as
"gentlemanlike..." and consistently referred to her sisters as "he." In
addition, Emily had an intense sense of privacy which made hiding her
identity especially important to her. In order to prove to Charlotte's
publishers that Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell were not one person,
Charlotte and Anne met with them in London; during the interview,
Charlotte inadvertently revealed that they were three sisters.
Her
admission enraged Emily.
Public debate about whether the Bells were one, two, or
three
persons and whether they were male or female continued until 1850, when
Charlotte's "Biographical Notice" to a new edition of Wuthering
Heights and Agnes Grey publically identified Anne and Emily
as Acton and Ellis Bell, respectively. Before and after Charlotte's
biographical
essay, reviewers of Wuthering Heights consistently compared it
to Jane Eyre, generally to its detriment. One reviewer believed
that Jane Eyre helped "to ensure a favorable reception" for her
sisters' novels (Atlas, January 1848).
CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S 1850 EDITION
In 1850, Charlotte edited her sisters' poems and novels; in a "Preface"
and "Biographical Notice," she provided biographical details about her
sisters and herself, characterized the novels and her sisters, and
defended both. A second round of reviews appeared in response to this
reissuing of Emily's and Anne's novels and to Charlotte's introduction.
In
general, reviewers were moved by pity at the early deaths of Emily and
Anne, as well as at the general hardship of the Brontë sisters'
lives, and were amazed at the discrepancy between their uneventful
lives and the violence and passion portrayed in their
novels. They also had a greater sense of Emily's achievement, which was
increasingly
compared to Shakespeare's.
However, Charlotte overemphasized the negativity of the
original
reviews
of Wutheirng Heights when she charged that the original
reviewers had
not appreciated Wuthering Heights. In reality, its power and
its
author's ability had originally been acknowledged, along with censure
for
its violence, brutality, and "coarseness." (Click here for illustrative
excerpts from the reviews).
Charlotte's biased view that reviews had been overhwlemingly negative
became "fact" in
literary history and biography and continues to be repeated.
Perhaps more significant than her misperception were
the characterizations which Charlotte promulgated about her sister and
which are still
being repeated. First, Charlotte presented her sister as "a child and
nursling
of the moors" through whom nature spoke; this explained the novel's
being
"moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath." Next Charlotte
metamorphosed
Emily into an accurate transcriber of the Yorkshire life and
inhabitants. Then Charlotte transformed Emily, in turn, (1) into a
Christian allegorist,
with Heathliff representing the sinner; (2) into the passive receptor
of
the creative gift; and, finally, (3) into the visionary artist. It did
not
matter to Charlotte that some of her characterizations of Emily were
contradictory: Thus, Emily was driven by a creative gift which "at
times strangely wills
and works for itself," so that she was unaware of what she had
created, and she was a controlled sculptor who saw how she
could
mold a granite block into "the vision of his meditations." She rarely
spoke
with the local people, and she knew them intimately, "knew
their
ways, their language, their family histories." Charlotte claimed
that
Emily
was impervious to the influence of others and could grow only through
time
and experience by following the dictates of her own nature. In one form
or another, all these characterizations continue to appear in critical
discussions
of Emily Brontë and her novel.
Brontë: Table of Contents
October 13, 2011
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