PREFACE

‘I have at this time before me the history of a mighty and passionate soul.’ So said Ellen Nussey when supplying Elizabeth Gaskell with information on one of the nineteenth century’s most enigmatic, and surely one of its most brilliant, writers. ‘It is of Emily Brontë I speak,’ concluded Ellen, and it is of Emily Brontë that I will be speaking throughout this book.

When I was writing Emily Brontë: A Life in 20 Poems in 2017 I was faced with a dilemma. Here was a writer of utmost genius, in my view (and I knew many others shared it) the author of the greatest novel ever set down on paper, and yet documentary evidence about Emily’s life was scant when compared to her sister Charlotte, or even her sister Anne.

Emily was an intensely shy woman who fiercely protected her privacy even when her writing was being placed before the world, and this creates challenges for those who would write a biography of this brilliant and unique writer. I believe, however, that Emily lived in both an external and internal world; her writing, especially her poetry, gives us a powerful insight into her thoughts and feelings, if we choose to see it.

Emily Brontë was a poet of the finest order. There can be little doubt that she was the greatest poet within the Brontë family, and one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century as a whole – a time when the art form was reaching its zenith. In this book I have started each chapter with one of twenty poems by Emily, not only because they are fine verses worthy of study and admiration (although they are), but because I believe each is relevant to a particular period of her life.

While taking a broadly chronological approach, in that we will start with her birth in Thornton and end after her tragic yet courageous death in Haworth three decades later, we will use her poems to illustrate important themes and events in her life. From her days as a teacher, through her journey to Brussels, her passion for the moors, and the death of her siblings, Emily’s verse provides the perfect accompaniment and illumination.

It can be difficult at times to ascertain whether some of her verses are purely connected to Gondal, the imaginary world she created with Anne Brontë, or whether she is examining her own feelings and life within them. In many of her verses, the two sides of her creativity were inextricably intertwined. As Emily grew older, she retreated more and more into her imaginary world of Gondalian intrigue and adventure, until the lines between fiction and reality became blurred. Even her overtly Gondal-based poetry, then, can actually tell us about Emily herself.

Since writing Emily Brontë: A Life in 20 Poems in 2017 I have continued to research and write about Emily and her family. I have given talks and presentations on the Brontës across the United Kingdom, including addressing an audience in Penzance, the Brontë motherland, on the occasion of Emily’s 200th birthday. What has become clear is that Emily Brontë’s popularity continues to grow. There is a love for this shy, kind, genius of a woman which is almost without parallel in the world of classic literature, and the key to this can surely be found in her life, her novel and her poems.

I am delighted, therefore, to now set before the public this new paperback edition of Emily Brontë: A Life in 20 Poems, including new appendices which provide translations of her remarkable Belgian devoirs and a possible solution to the mystery of her name.

It may never be possible to say with certainty how Emily felt, or how she lived from day to day, but by looking at these wonderful verses we can gain fascinating glimpses of the woman behind some of the nineteenth century’s most enduring writing. Her novel and many of her poems contain incredible stories, but the life of the author herself is just as incredible, in its own way. Emily Brontë was, after all, no coward soul, but a visionary woman who refused to conform to anything other than her own ideas of what was right and what was wrong. In her life and works, Emily Brontë was a truly timeless woman and author, one who has the power to astonish us today just as much as she did the critics nearly 200 years ago, for there will always be novels, there will always be poetry, but there will never be another Emily Brontë.

1

SMILING CHILD

Tell me, tell me, smiling child,

What the past is like to thee?

An Autumn evening soft and mild,

With a wind that sighs mournfully.

Tell me, what is the present hour?

A green and flowery spray,

Where a young bird sits gathering its power,

To mount and fly away.

And what is the future, happy one?

A sea beneath a cloudless sun,

A mighty, glorious, dazzling sea,

Stretching into infinity.

(‘Past, Present, Future’, dated 14 November 1839)

EMILY BRONTË WAS 21 years old when she wrote her short poem ‘Past, Present, Future’. She was not yet the genius who would write Wuthering Heights , but her verse already showed many of the themes that would dominate her writing: a yearning for the past, the supremacy of nature, and visions of the future, visions of death and the eternity to follow.

Emily writes of the past as a smiling infant, but this is not any child – it is a remembrance of herself. When we think of Emily Brontë today we think of an insular yet powerful woman, one whose might with a pen belied her timidity in real life. It is easy to think of Emily as downcast, morose even, but while these terms may indeed be applicable to some of Emily’s life, they do not apply to the whole of her thirty-year existence. In her infancy, Emily was a smiling, happy child, a pretty girl doted upon by a loving family. It was an idyllic beginning full of promise, and one looked back upon fondly by Emily in the opening lines of her poem.

Thornton is a village around 4 miles from the city of Bradford, in what is now the county of West Yorkshire. It is surrounded to the south by moorland, and one property with a perfect view of the moors was Kipping House. The large and elegant house was home to the Firth family, heads of Thornton society and with the money to enjoy a life that most of the village’s inhabitants could only dream of.

The head of the household was John Firth, the village doctor. His first wife died in 1814 after a tragic accident that saw her thrown from a horse, but in 1815 he married his second wife, Anne. Also at the house was John’s daughter, Elizabeth, and she kept a diary detailing dinner parties, social gatherings, shopping trips, charitable work and more. It is in this diary, in an entry dated 30 July 1818, that the 21-year-old Elizabeth writes, ‘Mrs J. Horsfall called. Emily Jane Brontë was born.’1 This is the first record of Emily Brontë in print, but of course it was far from the last. Elizabeth Firth was to become an influential figure in the lives of the Brontës: a friend to Emily’s parents, a benefactor at times of need, godmother to Anne, and, as we shall see, a potential stepmother to the Brontë siblings.

Emily and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, are to many the Queens of Yorkshire, and indeed they bring tourists from across the world, flocking to one particular western outpost of the county. They are also often thought of as being prim and proper examples of Victorian womanhood, but while this description may be applied to Charlotte Brontë, and to an extent Anne, although she was more willing to challenge the values of Victorian society within her writing, it could never be a description of the free-spirited and independent-minded Emily.

We need to go back a little further to get an idea of where Emily’s belligerence and rebelliousness come from. To discover Emily’s roots, and the beginnings of the Brontë family as a whole, we have to leave the churchyards of Yorkshire behind and look in upon an eighteenth-century elopement on the banks of the River Boyne. Emily’s father, Patrick Brontë, was a priest in the Church of England; it was a highly respectable position, if not necessarily a lucrative one, but of course he was neither born in England nor with the surname Brontë. The story is well known of how Patrick changed his surname to Brontë from the Irish Brunty, or perhaps Prunty, upon his arrival at St John’s College, Cambridge University, in 1802.2 The change in name was eventually adopted by his family in Ireland as well, including Emily’s grandfather, Hugh, who shared many characteristics in common with her.

Hugh Brunty’s story is unclear, even confusing, at many points, with associated legends that are now impossible to prove or disprove – obscured by the mists of time, and the sparsity of written records in eighteenth-century Ireland. Perhaps the most enduring myth, or possibly truth, about Hugh was that he was raised not by a Brunty at all, but by a cuckoo in the nest who had been brought from Liverpool – much like Heathcliff in Emily’s great novel. This account was brought to light by a late nineteenth-century treatise, The Brontës in Ireland by Dr William Wright. Wright based his book upon eyewitness accounts, and the stories of people who had known Patrick Brontë and his family, although it reads like an intoxicating mixture of fact and fiction, truths and half-remembered tales.

Patrick’s great-grandfather was a farmer and cattle dealer near Drogheda in County Louth, in what is now the Republic of Ireland, and he often travelled to Liverpool to sell cattle at the burgeoning market there. One of Wright’s sources recalled how the farmer came to adopt a helpless child:

On one of his return journeys from Liverpool a strange child was found in a bundle in the hold of the vessel. It was very young, very black, very dirty, and almost without clothing of any kind. No one on board knew whence it had come, and no one seemed to care what became of it. There was no doctor in the ship, and no woman except Mrs. Brontë, who had accompanied her husband to Liverpool. The child was thrown on the deck. Some one said, ‘Toss it overboard’; but no one would touch it, and its cries were distressing. From sheer pity Mrs. Brontë was obliged to succour the abandoned infant … When the little foundling was carried up out of the hold of the vessel, it was supposed to be a Welsh child on account of its colour. It might doubtless have laid claim to a more Oriental descent, but when it became a member of the Brontë family they called it ‘Welsh’.3

The author goes on to describe how Welsh Brunty, as he was known, elopes and marries his master’s daughter, Mary, in secret, and after being evicted wreaks revenge upon the family. Later he approaches one of his brothers-in-law and persuades him to let him adopt his son Hugh. Hugh is treated appallingly by Welsh, but eventually escapes and flees to the north of Ireland. This is supposedly the tale of the early years of Emily’s grandfather, Hugh Brunty, later Brontë, and the account has obvious similarities to Wuthering Heights – but is this because it was made up by either Wright or his source, or because it was a family folktale that Emily knew and drew upon?

We get a rather different account of Hugh from Patrick himself. Writing to Elizabeth Gaskell as she prepared to commence her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Patrick stated:

He [Patrick’s father, Hugh] was left an orphan at an early age. It was said that he was of ancient family … He came to the north of Ireland and made an early but suitable marriage. His pecuniary means were small – but renting a few acres of land, he and my mother by dint of application and industry managed to bring up a family of ten children in a respectable manner.4

One undisputed fact about Hugh was that he fell in love with Alice McClory from County Down. They wanted to marry, but there was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in their way – Hugh was a Protestant and Alice was a Catholic. They eloped, and after a clandestine marriage in Magherally Church they set up home in a two-roomed cottage near Emdale in the parish of Drumballyroney. The cottage in County Down can still be visited today and has become a place of pilgrimage for Brontë fans, as it was here, just a year after the wedding of Hugh and Alice, that their first son was born. Born on St Patrick’s Day, 1777, he was named Patrick after the saint, and was to become patriarch of perhaps the most famous family in world literature.

Patrick, as he revealed in his letter to Mrs Gaskell, was the first of a large family and, recognising the financial burden upon his parents, he was determined to make his own way in life from an early age. They were, by necessity, a poor family, but hard working and one that was nourished with love. Patrick’s younger sister Alice commented on this at the age of 95 in 1891: ‘My father came originally from Drogheda. He was not very tall but purty stout; he was sandy-haired and my mother fair-haired. He was very fond to his children and worked to the last for them.’5

We also hear that Hugh Brunty was renowned as a wonderful storyteller, and it is likely to have been at Hugh’s knee that Patrick developed his own love of stories and of books. It was this love of literature that changed his life forever. Patrick was training as a weaver, but one day a passing minister, Reverend Andrew Harshaw, heard the young boy reading aloud from Milton’s Paradise Lost.6 So impressed was the priest that he offered to give Patrick free tuition at a school he ran.

Patrick proved himself such an able scholar that by the age of 16 he was master of his own school. His prodigious talents as a scholar and schoolmaster came to the attention of another Anglican priest, the Reverend Thomas Tighe of Drumballyroney.7 Tighe was a wealthy man, and hired Patrick to be tutor to his children. Once again, Patrick’s scholarly prowess, hard work and pious nature impressed those around him. Tighe recognised that this young Irishman from a humble background could have a career within the Church, if he received a little help along the way. Thanks to Tighe’s connections and money, Patrick Brontë was offered and accepted a scholarship at Cambridge University and a vocation to the priesthood. It was a stellar rise for a man who would otherwise have seen out his years working on a farm or as a weaver.

After graduating from Cambridge, Patrick was ordained as a deacon in 1806, and then as a priest in 1807. He served as an assistant curate in a number of parishes in the south of England, until in January 1809 he became assistant curate at All Saints’ Church in Wellington, Shropshire. He remained in the parish for less than a year, but it was in Shropshire that he made a very important friendship – that of local schoolmaster, John Fennell.

In December 1807, Patrick moved north to the parish of Dewsbury in Yorkshire. It was part of the ‘heavy woollen area’, a booming district that was being transformed by the Industrial Revolution and the mills and factories that it brought. By 1811, Patrick received his first curacy, at the village of Hartshead on the hills outside Dewsbury. This was a momentous occasion for Patrick, and within a year he also gained a position as an examiner in the classics at a local school.

John Fennell of Shropshire had moved to Yorkshire as well, and had founded a school at Rawdon, near Leeds. Discovering that his friend Patrick was nearby, and knowing his reputation as an excellent Latin and Greek scholar, he enlisted his help. Also at the school were John’s wife, Jane Fennell, their daughter, also called Jane, and their niece, Maria Branwell. She soon became the focal point of Patrick’s visits to the establishment.

Maria was from Penzance on the south-western tip of Cornwall, where she was born into a large and prosperous merchant family in 1783. However, by the time Patrick met Maria her fortunes had declined; her parents, Thomas and Anne, had both died and she was now looking to make her own way in the world by helping at her aunt’s school. Maria was in her late twenties, and Patrick in his mid-thirties,8 but they fell rapidly in love.

On 29 December 1812 they were married in Guiseley Parish Church near Leeds. At the same ceremony, Maria’s cousin, Jane Fennell, married Reverend William Morgan, a Welshman and close friend of Patrick. It was a joyous day, a double celebration, and Patrick and Maria may have had a premonition of William Morgan baptising their children in the years to come. This is a role he indeed fulfilled, but all too soon Morgan also had to preside over the funerals of many of them.

At the beginning of 1814 their first child was born, a daughter named Maria after her mother. A year later she was joined by a sister, Elizabeth Brontë. With a growing family, Patrick and Maria began to look for a new parish that offered a greater salary and more convenient living quarters, which is why, in May 1815, they moved to Thornton. In effect, the parishes of Thornton and Hartshead were involved in an ecclesiastical swap. Thornton’s curate wanted to be nearer to Huddersfield as he had fallen in love with Frances Walker, of Lascelles Hall near the town.

The arrangement was greatly to the benefit of Patrick and Maria, as Thornton came with its own grace and favour parsonage building on the town’s Market Street, whereas at Hartshead they had to rent a cottage on a farm. Thornton Parsonage is no longer owned by the Church of England, and although it may not be as famous as a certain parsonage building in Haworth, it is still well worth a visit. It is now an elegant café and delicatessen with an Italian theme, but it also contains items of interest to Brontë lovers, including its centrepiece – the early nineteenth-century fireplace by which the three writing sisters were born. Patrick may not recognise the building if he saw it today, but he would certainly recognise the name, as it has been named after his fifth child, and one who graced the building as an infant – ‘Emily’s’.

Patrick and Maria Brontë, like many newly married couples of the time, had children on an almost annual basis, but unlike the majority of their contemporaries all their children survived childbirth and infancy. The first child born in Thornton was named Charlotte, after one of Maria’s sisters, and a year later, in 1817, their first and only son was born and christened Patrick, after his father. Patrick would always be known by his middle name to his family, taking on the maiden name of his mother – Branwell. In the male-dominated world of the early nineteenth century it would have been expected that Branwell would one day become the family’s breadwinner, and that he would also support his sisters prior to their marriages, but it was a burden of expectation that he would find impossible to bear.

In the summer of 1818 the fifth child of Patrick and Maria was born; a child who was destined to write possibly the greatest novel of all time, as well as being one of the most remarkable poets of her day. From Elizabeth Firth’s diary, we know that the child’s name had already been decided on the day of her birth, but even in the choice of name, Emily differs from her other siblings, just as she was to prove to be different in many other ways as she grew into a strong-willed and independent woman.

Emily Jane Brontë was the only Brontë daughter to be given a middle name, with Jane presumably being chosen as a tribute to both Maria’s cousin and the aunt who had played a role in bringing her and her husband Patrick together. Both Janes, Fennell and Morgan, would act as godmothers to the girl. The choice of Emily has to remain a mystery, as there is no record of an Emily among either the Cornish or Irish relatives; this makes Emily the only Brontë not named after a parent, aunt or, in Anne’s case, after her grandmother. It seems fair to surmise that a woman named Emily must have been a friend known to Patrick and Maria, and a special one at that, whose name was given precedence over the Jane that would have been a more traditional choice in the family.

Emily Brontë started her life with a mystery, and she was to become a lover of mysteries, a creator of mysteries, and an enigma herself. Emily was a smiling and much-loved child, but as her poem reveals, even at an early age there was a mournful wind blowing through her life – a sighing breeze that would ever remind her of the early loss of her mother and two eldest sisters.

2

THE SILENT DEAD

I see around me tombstones grey,

Stretching their shadows far away.

Beneath the turf my footsteps tread,

Lie low and lone the silent dead –

Beneath the turf – beneath the mould –

Forever dark, forever cold –

And my eyes cannot hold the tears,

That memory hoards from vanished years,

For Time and Death and Mortal pain,

Give wounds that will not heal again –

Let me remember half the woe,

I’ve seen and heard and felt below,

And Heaven itself – so pure and blest,

Could never give my spirit rest –

Sweet land of light! thy children fair,

Know nought akin to our despair –

Nor have they felt, nor can they tell,

What tenants haunt each mortal cell,

What gloomy guests we hold within –

Torments and madness, tears and sin!

Well – may they live in ecstasy,

Their long eternity of joy;

At least we would not bring them down,

With us to weep, with us to groan,

No – Earth would wish no other sphere,

To taste her cup