The poems of Emily Jane Bronte are passionate and powerful works that
convey the vitality of the human spirit and of the natural world. Only
twenty-one of her poems were published during her lifetime - this
volume contains those and all others attributed to her. Many poems
describe the mythic country of Gondal and its citizens that she
imagined with Anne, and remain the only surviving record of their joint
creation.
Other visionary works, including 'Remembrance' and 'No
coward soul is mine', boldly confront mortality and anticipate life
after death. And poems such as 'Redbreast early in the morning' and
'The blue bell is the sweetest flower' evoke the wild beauties of
nature she observed on the Yorkshire moors, while also examining the
state of her psyche.
The poems of Emily Jane Bronte are passionate and powerful works that convey the vitality of the human spirit and of the natural world. Only twenty-one of her poems were published during her lifetime - this volume contains those and all others attributed to her. Many poems describe the mythic country of Gondal and its citizens that she imagined with Anne, and remain the only surviving record of their joint creation.
Other visionary works, including 'Remembrance' and 'No coward soul is mine', boldly confront mortality and anticipate life after death. And poems such as 'Redbreast early in the morning' and 'The blue bell is the sweetest flower' evoke the wild beauties of nature she observed on the Yorkshire moors, while also examining the state of her psyche.
Emily Bronte lived from 1818 to 1848. Although she wrote only Wuthering Heights and about a dozen poms she is accepted as one of the most gifted writers ever. Perhaps the intensity of her writing grew out of the extraordinary pressures of her home life.
Emily’s mother died when she was three and she lived with her four sisters and one brother in a bleak, isolated Yorkshire village – Haworth. Her father doted on his only son, Branwell, and expected little from his daughters – they surprised him while Branwell wasted his life and died an alchoholic and drug addict. The girls suffered dreadfully at a cheap boarding school, the oldest two dying of malnutrition. Emily, Charlotte and Anne were brought home just in time but Emily never lost her terrible fear of institutions and of being closed in. The sisters later became governesses to help support Branwell, seen by their father as a future great artist. They also began to publish their writing, under male pen-names as there was much prejudice against women writers. Their first book, a collection of poetry, failed but Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights, was highly acclaimed and is still widely read today.
Emily seldom left her home village yet produced one of the most powerful novels of the inner self ever written. She caught a cold at her brother’s funeral in 1848 and died a few months later.
