Who was Emily Bronte?

My favorite novel is Wuthering Heights. I first read it when I was around eleven years old and was immediately drawn to the rugged landscape, the bleak tone, the unfulfilled longing that cried out from the pages.

Masterpiece’s To Walk Invisible, a two-hour film based on the three Bronte sisters, aired last Sunday night, and in my opinion, it was extremely well done. Raw, honest, and surprising, the movie affords a stark look at these women who produced such monstrous works of literature under male pen names.

Even though Wuthering Heights has always been my favorite novel, I confess to know very little about its author (other than the fact that she wrote under the name of Ellis Bell and never married). Obviously, Emily Bronte loved the character of Heathcliff. Much like the character of Catherine, despite Heathcliff’s darkness and evil doings, Emily saw past the posturing and understood he was a tortured soul who had been deeply wounded. Some scholars believe he may have been fashioned after her troubled, severely alcoholic brother, Branwell. Or perhaps his character represented one side of a romanticized battle between the suitable, socially appropriate gentleman—like Linton—and the wild, rake of a man who was Heathcliff.

Perhaps Heathcliff represented the internal struggle—a tug of war of between what was and what could be. The movie suggests Heathcliff was born of a story she overheard from someone else, but I suspect it was more than that.

So who was Emily Bronte?

(Emily Bronte/public domain)

Her sister, Charlotte Bronte, described her in this way: “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”

(Emily's dog, Grasper)

Her life was short (she died at thirty due to tuberculosis) and most of it she spent at home in her father’s parsonage in Yorkshire. When she attended school abroad with Charlotte, she was terribly homesick and longed for the moors. Reserved, shy, and stubborn to a fault, Emily was uncomfortable around people, and she was often found in the company of animals (and in her imaginary world of Gondal, created by the Brontes when they were children).

It was not easy living in the Yorkshire moors, and the Brontes were not well-off. Economics were certainly one reason for the girls seeking publication. Their house was in constant upheaval due to their brother’s alcohol and drug addiction. Emily was known to exhibit anorexic symptoms during times of extreme stress. Much like Catherine in Wuthering Heights, she would refuse to eat for days. Biographer Katherine Frank suggested that Emily spent much of her life in a state of psychological hunger in her biography, A Chainless Soul. “Even more importantly, how was this physical hunger related to a more pervasive hunger in her life–hunger for power and experience, for love and happiness, fame and fortune and fulfillment?”

It is interesting to note that Emily Bronte left behind virtually no correspondence except for two letters and a lot of raw, passionate poetry, which is extraordinarily good. Here is an excerpt from "Oh, Thy Bright Eyes Must Answer Now."

So, with a ready heart, I swore

To seek their altar-stone no more;

And gave my spirit to adore

Thee, ever-present, phantom thing

My slave, my comrade, and my king.

A slave, because I rule thee still;

Incline thee to my changeful will,

And make thy influence good or ill:

A comrade, for by day and night

Thou art my intimate delight,

My darling pain that wounds and sears,

And wrings a blessing out from tears

By deadening me to earthly cares;

And yet, a king, though Prudence well

Have taught thy subject to rebel.

And am I wrong to worship where

Faith cannot doubt, nor hope despair,

Since my own soul can grant my prayer?

Speak, God of visions, plead for me,

And tell why I have chosen thee!

The rest of Emily Bronte’s life has been pieced together through others' comments about her.

I highly recommend watching To Walk Invisible. If you didn’t catch it on Sunday, you can still watch it on Masterpiece’s website.

Have you ever read Wuthering Heights? If so, what is your opinion of the novel?

More good info on Emily Bronte found here:
Emily Bronte

X is for Xavier Ross

I am participating in the 2016 A-to-Z Blog Challenge. My theme is the music of my life.

In 2014, my novel Song from the Ashes was published by eLectio Publishing, a small press based out of Texas. Song from the Ashes is a retelling of Edith Wharton's s classic novel, The Age of Innocence, and tells the story of Landon Kingsley and his struggle to choose between two women: the one he really loves and the one he thinks he's supposed to marry. It was a departure from my sex-trafficking topics; this one dealt with the psychological tortures of love, its disappointments and demands.

I like to write about characters standing at crossroads who have to make big decisions. Historically speaking, I have always been attracted to plots that involve tortured men and the women who desperately want to love them. Or love affairs that simply cannot happen for one reason or another.  Going forward, I plan to write more books with these types of characters.

Currently, I am finishing a novel entitled Dangerous to Know. This is historical fiction based on the disastrous marriage of famous poet, Lord George Gordon Byron to Annabella Milbanke. Because the story departs from historical details at the end, I am naming his character Lord Gregory Gordon Bromby. He is dark, moody, and Byronic--just my sort of anti-hero. It has been a pleasure to write, and I think in the future I may follow this path for my writing topics.

This brings me to Xavier. Xavier Ross. I do not know the story yet, except that it will be a Gothic mystery set in historical England. I imagine this new character as a sort of Poldark meets Heathclifff and Hamlet...and of course he will be a tortured soul with secrets and an inexplicable magnetism.

I plan to finish Dangerous to Know in May, and Xavier Ross's story will begin this summer...stay tuned...

Whenever I think of dark and tortured characters, I think of Depeche Mode's tune One Caress. And then, who could ever forget Kate Bush's nod to Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff?

Who are some of your favorite heroic (or anti-heroic) characters?

 

N is for New Era

I am participating in the 2016 A-to-Z Blog Challenge. My theme is the music of my life.

In 1993, the movie Remains of the Day based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro came out in the theaters, and it completely changed my life. I had always been an Anglophile,  but watching Anthony Hopkins portray the stoic, ultra-reserved, and emotionally blocked butler serving on a sprawling estate in the English countryside solidified my lifetime love of all things British.

I also decided that a career in music was not for me. I was much more interested in writing about the lives of the composers than analyzing orchestral scores. But I was already three-quarters of the way through the program. Too late to turn back now. So I decided I would finish out the program and possibly pursue a grad degree in creative writing thereafter. In the meantime, I was writing…sweeping epic sagas—some of them more than six hundred pages in length—usually set in London and involving some tortured Romantic-era composer.

That summer, I decided I would visit my good friend, Michelle, and her family in England. Michelle and I had become great friends in high school, and as her family was from Scotland originally and was only in the US on a four-year stint, we had always known she would return to the UK after high school. We had kept in touch through monthly phone calls, letters, and tapes, but I told her one day I would come visit. Now it was becoming a reality. As I moved toward my departure date, I purposed to make that first trip across the pond one of many. The eventual goal: my relocation to the United Kingdom.

I no longer listened to hard rock or heavy metal music. I had moved on to instrumental soundtracks that coincided with British films like Howard's End and A Room with a View—much better writing music than Metallica. Gone were my days of obsessing over rockers. Thanks to a spate of British films out at that time, I was convinced that the love of my life did not exist in this country. He lived in Ireland, Wales, or somewhere on the Yorkshire moors. He was the perfect mix of Dracula, Hamlet, Heathcliff, and Lord Byron. He lived with his two Irish Wolfhounds in a mansion with a name like Wuthering Heights or Manderley. He looked like either Ralph Fiennes or Hugh Grant (or a combination of the two) and his name was Nicholas Dunraven…or something like that.

And so that summer I traveled to the United Kingdom…in search of him.