No Coward Soul is Mine

Some thoughts on Emily Brontë

Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”

An so it is. All-consuming love. Intense language. Raw, untamed emotion that mirrors the moors. It is Emily Brontë at her best. It is Wuthering Heights.

“Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” A declaration so profound. A declaration of transcendent love that this young writer could not have known. Or could she?

The story of the Brontës is one of isolation. A family, primarily of women, tucked away on the Yorkshire moors. Aside from wild nature, they had access to a well-stocked library and a few excursions or periods away from the family Parsonage. And they had each other.

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Emily Brontë lived to the age of 30, having written only one novel and countless works of poetry. Wuthering Heights, a masterpiece universally acknowledged, a story that confounded the people of her time due to its coarse, unpleasant characters and its sheer brutality, stands remarkable for many reasons. How could this young, reclusive woman write such a novel?

She read widely. Byron, Shakespeare, Milton. Consuming all the books available to her, plying her thoughts into poems, using language to convey the ethereal and the substantial. Wuthering Heights is an alloy of prose, ideas, emotions, people, and the moors which are a living presence in all her works.

Emily Brontë’s brilliance lies not only in what she wrote but how she wrote it. Wuthering Heights is a story within a story. She uses a nested narrative to not just tell us the story directly, but to sift it through various layers of memory and hearsay. The narrator is unreliable. By withholding her own voice, the authorial voice, the creator’s voice, she pulls the reader into the story as a participant who must interpret the very tragic events taking place on the page.

In her grasp, the landscape is elemental and wild. It is not the description of the setting. It is a living, breathing character, and it affects the emotional register of the human drama.

And all the while, she elevates love into something supernatural. It is part of life and death. It haunts. It goes beyond body, beyond soul. Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is not and cannot be contained by life.

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Emily Brontë, at heart, was a poet. She wrote with lyrical intensity, and she wrestled with existence in all its forms and meanings.

“Though earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And Thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee”

- No Coward Soul is Mine

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Virginia Woolf once wrote of Emily Brontë:

“The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries... She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction...”

Woolf said that Emily was a woman who wrote ‘as a woman without bitterness.’ Indeed, Emily Brontë ignored any limits imposed upon her as a woman, and she pressed on. She looked not for approval, and she certainly didn’t offer apology. For Woolf, this was true artistic purity, and she recognized it as a rare courage.

Emily Brontë was able to hold chaos and harmony together on the page. She was something rare: ‘a spirit, a voice, a being.’ She lived primarily in imagination, kneading it into narrative, extending an invitation to the reader, calling forward the fearlessnes to step beyond safety and confront the landscape of the soul.

They call it wuthering, that sound.

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The work of Emily Brontë resides in the public domain. Wuthering Heights is available to be read online at Project Gutenberg here.

If you’re interested in an overview of Emily Brontë and her two other famous sisters — Charlotte and Anne, engage with them in our In Search of the Brontë Sisters literature-inspired puzzle book.

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Last night, we hosted our monthly call to discuss all things books. The topic: events.

Primarily we spoke of hosting book events — in bookshops, literary venues, and other locations — and we also explored other possibilities and how to think differently about literary gatherings, how to think about the reader, how to calm the nerves of the author, and how to shift our thinking to focus on the power of the written word. You can view the recording here, and you can join us next month on November 12 when we convene to discuss how podcasts are changing the landscape.

Thanks to all who participated. Our community is growing. And we are grateful.