That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel - a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate”, but “we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. For Brontë’s birthday, I offer to you a selection of literary opinions on her one hit wonder, which was polarizing at the time of its publication and remains so 171 years later. Others, some of them right here in the Literary Hub office, don’t care for it quite so much. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes borrowed its title for poems. Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Henry Miller recommended it. She wrote one complete novel, which has become an enduring classic of English literature. Her coffin was only 16 inches wide (though this may not mean what we think it means). She died only 30 years later, of tuberculosis.
Two hundred years ago today, Emily Brontë was born.
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