Fierce, wild, intractability. Emily Brontë's untameable spirit

Emily Brontë is perhaps the most compelling character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s splendid Life of Charlotte Brontë. Though she appears incidentally—it is, after all, the story of her sister’s life—whenever she does appear, she steals the scene, at least for me. Oh Emily—so sullen, so scowling, so fashionless, so desperate for the freedom of solitude!

—that free, wild, untameable spirit, never happy nor well but on the sweeping moors that gathered round her home—that hater of strangers, doomed to live amongst them, and not merely to live but to slave in their service.

Yes, the lack of biographical information about Emily is one of the great losses of English Literature (as are the losses of her other writings, and the novel she had been working on before she died—alas!) Just think of the great life that could have been written—that could have been lived! Below, I have copied out many of the passages from Gaskell that give us glimpses of Emily, which all benefit from Gaskell’s wonderfully careful writing.

Gaskell has commonly been accused of doing Charlotte Brontë a disservice, but that is a contextless moral judgement more suited to modern priorities. Gaskell gives a great study of how a unique talent developed and repressed the sexual side of Brontë’s life in order to allow her a candid reception in a hostile world. It is not Gaskell we must blame for the fact that the author of Jane Eyre was widely assumed to be “a filthy minx” whose mind had “overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine”. To get the Brontë sisters a fair hearing for their work, she had to first subvert the Victorian culture wars. (You can read my views of Gaskell’s book in more detail here—now with no paywall!)

As you will see from the extracts below, Emily’s character was hardly “cleaned up” for the public. She may have read German while she made the bread, but she also beat her dog and shunned society. What emerges is not a demure, feminized picture but a proud singular woman whose immense talent can be seen emanating from her temperament.

Raised as a reader

Mr. Brontë encouraged a taste for reading in his girls; and