Women in All Ages

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21414, 11 February 1933, Page 6 (Supplement)

Women in All Ages

Too' much has already been written about the Brontes; it seems that one can never come to the end of what people have to say about them. New data, new correspondence turns up refuting what their earlier biographers (chiefly Mrs. Gaskell) had to say of the family whose circumscribed moorland life held, and still holds, such an absorbing interest. It is really amazing how the Bronte craze has become what might almost be termed a cult; however, it is a healthy one and better than most of our modern manias, literary or otherwise. The latest addition is a Bronte play—the Brontes dramatised; one can almost imagine Emily's lips curling in a little, disdainful smile—Charlotte might have liked it, but Emily— She was the true genius of the family. Critics have recognised a new, a wonderful note in her poems, expressive of a strange, deep, isolate soul. " Wutbering Heights" is the most modern thing the Brontes ever did, free of the Victorian archaisms of "Jane Eyre" and the absurd yet pitiful attempts of Anne to be a writer too. "Whatever English novelists, including women, have produced in the whole course of history of fictionwriting, it is safe to say that " Wuthering Heights " will stand and has stood alone. Its intricate conception of plot and the skill and power shown in working it out puts Emily Bronte on a plane entirely her own. We know strangely little about her—was there more to know ? There must have been, but it is lost now. We havo pictures of her tramping over the. purple or copperburnished moorland, up on the ridges of Yorkshire with her faithful attendant, Keeper. Perhaps Keeper understood her. She went up there from her household round of cooking, ironing, pie-making, alone under the grey-driven Yorkshire skies and sought inspiration from the beauty she found there. .When the sun came out and lit gorgeous purple fires in the heather and larks sang up in the blue high skies, then we can imagine

13—EMILY BRONTE

Emily expanding to the exhilaration of it all, forgetting for a while the trouble about Bran well and the shadowy constriction that lay over her family. She paid for the publication of her novel and did not get anything back .from it, hardly a press notice and little in her favour. It was much later that "Wuthering Heights " came into its own. We can imagine that this had little outward effect on the woman herself; she was selfcontained, restrained. Did she ever love? If so it is not recorded. Who was there for Emily in her world of moorland heather and bitter winds that shook the Haworth vicarage—her round of quiet domestic duties, her almost poor circumstances ? It is a question of enthralling interest and we shall never know the answer, only that at all events she could have loved, and her love story, if she had one, would have been different,, as Emily was different from others of her era and perhaps of all time. That picture of her refusal to go to bed, to give in, when she was dying; of her trying to comb her long, thick hair, the comb falling from her weak fingers, is a very telling one. It is another side of that Emily who sang when she rolled out her dough and strode up the hills alone with her own shining spirit. She was only in the early thirties when they carried her . out through the gate that gave on to the bristling graveyard that seemed to be waiting for them all. l't was a dreadfully lonely house afterward as Charlotte testified—Charlotte was much given to recording things; Emily was not. The contents of Emily's work-box have been published in a recent biography—a work-box—it was the age of work-boxes; full of little simple things of none but personal value, things such as our mothers' mothers put away; little things in tissue paper, hair, reels of cotton, rusty needles, faded flowers, work begun and never finished. Little intimate things, and not one sign of the genius of her; just the little things that make us smile at the innocence and fragrance of Victorian femininity. —M.G-.