Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The Haworth context
- 2 'Our plays': The Brontë Juvenilia
- 3 The poetry
- 4 'Three distinct and unconnected tales': The Professor, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights
- 5 'Strong family likeness': Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- 6 Shirley and Villette
- 7 'Getting on': ideology, personality and the Brontë characters
- 8 Women writers, women's issues
- 9 The Brontës And Religion
- 10 The Brontë myth
- Further reading
- Index
- Series List
10 - The Brontë myth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 The Haworth context
- 2 'Our plays': The Brontë Juvenilia
- 3 The poetry
- 4 'Three distinct and unconnected tales': The Professor, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights
- 5 'Strong family likeness': Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- 6 Shirley and Villette
- 7 'Getting on': ideology, personality and the Brontë characters
- 8 Women writers, women's issues
- 9 The Brontës And Religion
- 10 The Brontë myth
- Further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Pale Sisters! reared amid the purple sea
Of windy moorland, where, remote, ye plied
All household arts, meek, passion-taught and free,
Kinship your joy and Fantasy your guide!
Ah! Who again ’mid English heaths shall see
Such strength in frailest weakness, or so fierce
Behest on tender women laid, to pierce
The world’s dull ear with burning poetry?
Whence was your spell? and at what magic spring,
Under what guardian Muse, drank ye so deep
That still ye call and we are listening;
That still ye plain to us and we must weep?
Ask of the winds that haunt the moors, what breath
Blows in their storms, outlasting life and death!
Myth or myths?
A sombre moor – a treeless expanse of barely inhabited upland swept by savage storms. Three solitary figures, struggling against the wind or, perhaps, sitting in the austere parsonage, reading, writing and eagerly conversing about life, and literature, and love. From their talk rise other figures in similar landscapes, suffering, even tragic, but likewise bold and eager in claiming their share of 'life, fire, incident'. Jane and Rochester, Catherine and Heathcliff are names that shape the dreams of the young and haunt the minds of the old.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës , pp. 214 - 241Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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