Wuthering Heights IS NOT Emily Brontë
There’s this rumour that’s been going around. It’s been going around since about 1847 and it’s been perpetuated by lazy (or sensationalist) biographers, terrible film makers and even Emily’s sister herself. I feel it’s time to dispel it.
The novel Wuthering Heights does not define Emily’s character nor her beliefs. She was not some fey, half-civilised creature who ran about the moors in rain-soaked dresses, a heathen who shunned modern society and acceptability to be ‘at one’ with nature. She was not cut off from decency, her only friends the rough country folk and the very heather upon the ground. She was not wild, primitive, innocent of modernity. She was not Catherine Earnshaw, Kate Bush in the Wuthering Heights video or Elfine Starkadder from Cold Comfort Farm.
Of course we judge artists by their works and it is terribly sad Emily never wrote a second novel. This of course means that we tend to judge Emily by Wuthering Heights and that’s entirely understandable - or would be, if we didn’t know anything else about her character from letters, diaries and her beautiful poetry.
Anne and Charlotte wrote about what they knew in their novels. They had both had experience as individuals in the greater world - both had worked as governesses and Charlotte had learned and taught at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. Emily attended the Pensionnat alongside her sister but only alongside her sister - Emily left to be with her father after her aunt died and Charlotte, after a brief return home, went on to work and study there for some time, falling in love with her teacher there - her experiences went on to inspire Jane Eyre and Vilette in particular. Emily’s experiences of work and education outside of her family were traumatising. When she was six, she was sent to school alongside her elder sisters. Two of those sisters ended up dying of typhoid that they caught at the school and Emily was (understandably) withdrawn from the school. A decade later, she was once more tried with school but hated it so desperately that she was against sent home. At the age of 20, she became a teacher but once more found it so difficult that she gave up her job after several months.
Emily’s life at home was quiet, mundane and uneventful - she seemed to rather enjoy it that way. She was good at housekeeping and took on that role after her Aunt Branwell died. She also did a lot of the actual housework alongside the beloved family servants, kept the garden, played piano and taught herself languages. She had a small circle of friends, most of whom had originally been friends of her siblings, and got on well with her father’s curates. She attended talks and concerts, went to the library etc. but for the most part she lived a fairly quiet existence.
So where did Wuthering Heights come from? Well, in part it came from local tales and legends - one in particular that was known in the locality of the school where she had taught for those few months. She was a natural storyteller and the stories that were told to her were remembered and used in her writings. She was also inspired by the writers she had enjoyed since childhood - Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Scott etc. She wrote vociferously from childhood on a series with her younger sister Anne, the tales of Gondal, and in fact the stories of Heathcliff and Catherine appear in these works in an early form. And you know what? Quite a lot of it also came from her imagination.
When WH was published, there was huge outcry that anyone could write anything so depraved and disgusting. After Emily’s death, it became public knowledge that the author of the novel was a woman and the public were so shocked that a woman could have written such a thing - how could it possibly be? Well, explained Charlotte, doing her best, perhaps, to save her sister’s reputation but also entirely fabricating the Brontë myth in the meantime, her sister had been a simple soul, cut off from society, who spent her time with the rougher folk of the Yorkshire moors. Their father, according to Charlotte, had been half of a madman and there was no hope that his daughters would ever be well adjusted and write pretty little society novels. Of course the fact that her father was still alive when Charlotte made these accusations didn’t really seem to matter to her and, after Charlotte’s death and the publication of Mrs Gaskell’s A Life of Charlotte Brontë, the number one source for all Brontë myths, was deeply deeply hurt by the betrayal - he’d been the one who had educated his children and given them as rich a life as he could within his limited means.
tl;dr Emily was pretty normal really, just quite shy, but Charlotte didn’t want people to think this because her being normal would mean that it was OUTRAGEOUS to have written such a thing and she couldn’t deal with that so she made her out to have been a bit of a freaky weirdo because of their terrible upbringing in the wilderness of Haworth. Yeah right.
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