Emily and Wuthering Heights

Some discoveries arrive by accident and change nothing. Others arrive by trespass and change the literature of a language. The hinge is rarely in the writing itself, which is private and slow; it is in the moment a second pair of eyes falls on the page and refuses to look away. The Brontë family kept its writing close. In one autumn morning at Haworth, that habit broke, and an unsigned book began its journey toward print under a name nobody could place to a sex or a county.

THE PARSONAGE

Patrick Brontë had brought his children up on the edge of the moor at Haworth, in a stone house with the churchyard at one side and the open ground at the other. By 1845 four were left of the six: Branwell sliding into drink in the back bedroom, Charlotte returned from Brussels with her French and her unspoken griefs, Anne home from her governess post at Thorp Green, Emily settled where she had always wished to be, between the kitchen, the dog, and the heather. Emily was twenty-seven. She had been writing since she could hold a pen, in the miniature script she and Anne used for the Gondal saga, and she had been keeping the verses in a portable lap-desk of sloped mahogany with a brass plate on the lid. The desk was hers. The family understood that.

THE OPENED DESK

It is an October morning. The fire is laid in the dining-room grate but not lit. Charlotte is at the table by the window with the desk beside her and the wind moving against the panes. Emily has gone out with Keeper, the mastiff, on her usual walk; she will not be back before eleven. Charlotte has lifted the lid. She has told herself afterwards, and told her readers in 1850, that it was something more than surprise that seized her, a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. She reads four poems standing up. The hand is small, even, and unhurried. The lines are not Cowper at one remove and not Wordsworth at one remove. They are a voice she has lived beside for twenty-seven years and never quite heard.

A SECOND OF TIME AT HAWORTH

Charlotte stands with the quarto open in her hands and weighs, in the space of a breath, three things that cannot all be kept. There is the desk, which was not hers to open, and the sister who will come in from the moor in an hour and find it shut wrongly; there is the secrecy of the household, by which each of them writes and none of them speaks of it; and there is the page in her hand, which she has read four poems into and already knows, by the test her year in Brussels taught her, to be of a different order from anything in the family's drawer. To close the desk and say nothing would be loyalty to the rule, and a small theft from English literature. To speak would be trespass owned and made worse, since the only honest way to own it is to propose, on the strength of the trespass, that the poems go out into the world. She is a clergyman's daughter and a governess; she has been schooled to obedience and to silence about her own gifts. She decides against both. When Emily comes in at half past eleven with the dog wet to the shoulder and the cold of the moor in her shawl, Charlotte tells her plainly: she has opened the desk, she has read four of the poems, and she means to say, having read them, that the three sisters ought to publish.

THE ARGUMENT AND THE BELLS

The quarrel lasted the rest of the day and into the next. Emily's anger at the trespass was, by Charlotte's later account, hard and slow to soften; what softened it was Anne, who came in on the second morning with a sheaf of her own verses and asked, quietly, whether the volume might be the three of them. The compromise was the one Charlotte had foreseen. They would publish jointly, under names the world could not assign to a sex: Currer for Charlotte, Ellis for Emily, Acton for Anne, all Bells, the initials kept. Their father in the next room was not to be told. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell came out from Aylott and Jones in May 1846 at the sisters' own expense. It sold two copies. They took the news of the two copies and turned, without ceremony, to prose. Charlotte began The Professor. Anne began Agnes Grey. Emily, at her end of the dining-room table, after the day's bread was set and the dog was fed, began Wuthering Heights.

THE WRITING OF THE NOVEL

The composition is mostly unwitnessed. Emily kept no diary apart from the birthday-papers she and Anne sealed up every four years. Charlotte's memoir gives the room rather than the work: Keeper lying across her sister's feet, the curates' visits gone through without notice, the moor walked at dusk, the kitchen claimed for the writing while Tabby the parsonage maid grumbled about the fire. The novel was finished in the summer of 1847. Thomas Cautley Newby of Mortimer Street took it together with Anne's Agnes Grey for fifty pounds and sat on it for months. Jane Eyre under Currer Bell came out at Smith, Elder in October and made its noise. Emily and Anne's books followed at Newby in December, Ellis Bell's in three volumes, the binding plain. The reviewers read it as the work of a violent man with a strong native genius and a weak grasp of plot; several said it must be by the same hand as Jane Eyre, and Newby printed an advertisement that nearly said so. The reviews puzzled Emily. They did not unduly distress her. She kept on with the housework. She kept on with the dog. She wrote nothing, that has survived, after the novel.

THE DINING-ROOM SOFA

Branwell died at the parsonage on the twenty-fourth of September 1848. Emily walked to his funeral on the twenty-eighth and caught a cold there she did not throw off. She would not see a doctor sent up from Halifax. She would not stay in bed. By Charlotte's letters to W. S. Williams that autumn she was a real stoic in illness, refusing sympathy as steadily as she refused medicine. On the morning of the nineteenth of December she came down the stairs herself to feed the dog and to comb her hair, and she sat down on the dining-room sofa where she had written most of the book, and at last, by Charlotte's note set down the same day, she said if you will send for a doctor I will see him now. She was dead at two in the afternoon. She was thirty years old.

THE PREFACE AND THE VAULT

Anne was carried to Scarborough by the following May and buried there. Charlotte buried all of them and went on. In 1850 she wrote the preface to the second edition of Wuthering Heights to set straight, by her sister's lights, what the reviewers had got wrong, and to lift the name Ellis Bell off the title page and put Emily Brontë in its place. Emily lies in the family vault under the floor of Haworth parish church, twenty yards from the parsonage door. The lap-desk of sloped mahogany with the brass plate on the lid is in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in the room where it was opened. The book has been in print continuously for one hundred and seventy-nine years.

Some lives close the door on themselves and ask the world for nothing. The world, occasionally, comes in by another door. A sister who should not have opened a desk opened it; four poems were read against the rule of the house; and a novel that nobody in Haworth had asked the moor for was carried out under a name that hid its writer and could not, in the end, keep hiding her. What remains is small and exact: the brass plate on the lid of a portable writing-desk, kept now behind glass twenty yards from the church floor under which she lies.