Brontë · 1846
Emily and Wuthering Heights
In the autumn of 1845, in the dining-room of the parsonage at Haworth, Charlotte Brontë opened her sister Emily's writing-desk in Emily's absence and read the manuscript pages of poems Emily had been keeping for nine years. The discovery led to the joint volume *Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell* under the three deliberately ungendered pseudonyms; it sold two copies. By the autumn of 1846 Emily was halfway through *Wuthering Heights*, the only novel she ever wrote. It was published by Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, was thought by reviewers to be the work of a violent man, and is now usually reckoned the most extraordinary single novel of nineteenth-century English fiction. Emily was twenty-nine. She had eight months to live when the book came out. She refused to go down to Halifax to consult a doctor. She died of consumption on the nineteenth of December 1848 at the parsonage, in the dining-room where she had written most of the book.
It is October 1845, in the dining-room of the parsonage at Haworth. The room is small and cold and the fire is laid but not lit. Charlotte is at the table by the window. Emily's writing-desk, a portable lap-desk of sloped mahogany with a brass plate, is on the side-table. Charlotte has opened it. Emily has gone out for her morning walk on the moor with Keeper, the mastiff. The wind is up.
Charlotte is twenty-nine years old. She has been a governess, a teacher, a pupil at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. She has been writing in secret since she was twelve. She has, in the desk, found a quarto-sized manuscript of poems in Emily's small hand. She has read four of them up.
She thinks: these are not the poems of a private person who writes for the family. These are not Cowper or Wordsworth at one remove. These are something else.
She thinks: Emily will not forgive me for having opened the desk.
She thinks: I will tell her that I opened the desk and I will tell her that I read four of the poems and I will tell her, after that, that we ought to publish.
Emily comes in at half past eleven. The argument lasts the rest of the day and into the next. Anne joins it on the second day with the news that she has been writing poetry too, and would Charlotte like to look at hers as well, and would the volume be the three of them. The compromise is that they will publish a joint volume under names that the world will not be able to assign to a sex, Currer for Charlotte, Ellis for Emily, Acton for Anne, all Bells, and that not even their father in the next room is to know.
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published by Aylott and Jones in May 1846. It sold two copies. The three sisters, by Charlotte's later memoir, took the news of the two copies and went straight on to the next stage, which was novels. Charlotte was writing The Professor. Anne was writing Agnes Grey. Emily was, at her end of the dining-room table, after the day's housework, writing Wuthering Heights.
The composition is undocumented. Emily kept no diary apart from the four-year birthday-papers she shared with Anne. Charlotte's memoir written after Emily's death gives glimpses, the dog Keeper at her feet, the curates' visits ignored, the moor walks at dusk, the writing in the kitchen with the parsonage maid Tabby grumbling about the fire. The novel was finished by the summer of 1847. Newby of Mortimer Street took it for fifty pounds for the three sisters' books together. He sat on it. Jane Eyre under Charlotte came out at Smith Elder in October. Emily and Anne's books followed at Newby in December.
Wuthering Heights was reviewed as a book by a violent man with a strong native genius and a weak grasp of plot. Several reviews suggested the writer was the same Bell as Jane Eyre; Newby printed an advertisement that almost said so. The reviews puzzled Emily. They did not unduly distress her. She was, by the testimony of all three of her surviving family, the strongest mind and the strongest will in the parsonage. She kept on with the housework. She kept on with the dog. She wrote nothing, that has survived, after the novel.
She caught a cold at her brother Branwell's funeral on the twenty-eighth of September 1848 and never threw it. She would not see a doctor. She would not stay in bed. She came down the stairs of the parsonage on the morning of the nineteenth of December 1848 to feed the dog herself and to comb her hair, and she sat down on the dining-room sofa, and she said, by Charlotte's note made the same day, if you will send for a doctor I will see him now, and she was dead at two in the afternoon. She was thirty years old. She is buried in the family vault under the floor of Haworth parish church, twenty yards from the parsonage. Branwell is in the same vault. Anne would be in Scarborough by the next May. Charlotte, who buried all of them, would write the preface to the second edition of Wuthering Heights in 1850 to set straight, by her sister's lights, what the reviewers had got wrong. The book has been in print continuously for one hundred and seventy-eight years.