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Even the light of 200 birthday candles could not pierce the darkness of "Wuthering Heights". But the fire that burned in Emily Bronte roared through the centuries
As is remarkable that at the bicentenary of her birth, this reclusive woman would still have to cry to our window like Catherine: "Leave me alone come in, let me in! I'm coming home!
Charlotte's younger sister, Emily, was born on July 30, 1818, in Yorkshire, England, to Maria Branwell, who died a few years later, and to Patrick Bronte, parish priest. Together with her three surviving siblings, Emily has stoked a unique creative oven in the annals of literary history. The children have written fantastic stories together, creating imaginary worlds of romantic and military adventures.
Only the poetic remains of this juvenile survive today, but during their brief lives, each of the Bronte sisters has managed to publish at least one novel. they generate more cult worship than "Wuthering Heights". Yes, Jane Eyre of Charlotte may have more readers, but the story of the young Catherine and Heathcliff, the mysterious bad boy really bad, remains the most feverish love story of English literature
. With this blaze of fury and passion, filmmakers have been drawn to the gloomy moors of Bronte as inexorably (and disastrously) as Catherine is attracted to Heathcliff. Everyone from Laurence Olivier to Timothy Dalton and Ralph Fiennes took the side of "the devil". In 2015, Lifetime Network set up "Wuthering High School" in Malibu, which is not so much an adaptation as a profanation. Perhaps the plot is simply too static and too broad to be captured on the screen, which may explain why Kate Bush's single "Wuthering Heights" (1978) remains the best tribute.
barely preordained. Published in 1847 under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell, "Wuthering Heights" hit its early readers as "the paradise of a perfect misanthrope". The first reviewers called it "strange," "unpleasant," "confusing," "disjointed," and even "inexpressibly painful." Absolutely true, but they made it sound like a bad thing.
One critic was particularly distressed by the dark gloom of the novel. "There has never been a period in our history," he concludes, "when English could do without the sun so well," which seems to be the type that comes to women and says : "Come, girl: Give us smiles! "
Of course, Emily was not subject to dizziness, but despite the extraordinary fame of her unique novel, she remains obscured by the fog, which only makes her more attractive to our own projected fantasies." She would have been shy and private.A family member claimed that she seldom left home except to go to church or to walk alone. she is still obscured by Charlotte's clumsy efforts to tidy up her little sister's reputation after her death in 1848.
In an embarrassing preface to the second edition of "Wuthering Heights," Charlotte praised the novel – "We Seems sometimes breathe lightning "- while questioning the wisdom of creating a character like Heathcliff. She went on to suggest that Emily was not an artist as talented as a natural genius, "a native and an infant from the moors" who was working "in a wild workshop, with simple tools, from simple materials. It's a surprisingly chauvinistic argument, and factually false, given the broad reading of Emily's romantic literature – in English and German. At the height of her fraternal betrayal, Charlotte wrote, "Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done."
In fact, we do not know what Emily did.
Long after "Wuthering Heights" seemed rusted by time and softened by familiarity, it remains an extravagant and turbulent novel.
I found history with its nested narrators and tangled, confusing and dull family tree. The rereader this month, however, I was dazzled by his supernatural modernity.
The way the characters resist any moral explanation, the way the style oscillates between Gothic Romanticism and Flint Realism. this claustrophobic moor – it's scandalously daring. Charlotte did not have the courage to leave her little Jane Eyre in the red room for more than a few hours, but "Wuthering Heights" reads as if Catherine never went out.
The novelist Kate Mosse is one of many celebrities celebrating Emily's bicentennial with the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. She writes by e-mail: "There is no excuse within" Wuthering Heights ", no attempt to make the story acceptable or the characters friendly or domestic, but rather she has an unashamed sense of one's own purpose, one's own self. "
Emily, after all, is the woman who wrote:" No cowardly soul is mine / no tremor in the troubled sphere by the storms of the world. "And the characters that she created are just as intrepid, as daring in their contempt for what is expected, what is reasonable, what makes sense: their pitiless smallness, their wickedness, their physical and emotional abuse, including knife throwing and dog hanging, I do not deny the disgusting nature of all this behavior; history would make an effective PowerPoint presentation on disruptive behavior procedures.But the romantic tragedy is cathartic, not instrumental The wonder of "Wuthering Heights" is its exponential emotions: "Such anxiety in the burst of grief!"
We know that Catherine is doomed and Heathcliff is "a fierce, ruthless, wolf man", but how subtle Unbridled passion feels in our age aware of transactional connections and enlightened unions. No dating app would ever bring these two lovers together; no marriage algorithm would ever predict a happy future. And even . "He is more than me," cries Catherine. "Whatever the nature of our souls, hers and mine are the same."
Such a romantic fusion is a catastrophe that radiates the kingdom of Wuthering Heights and leaves an area of explosion that should prevent others, but who can withstand the approach of this crater of sorrow and feel the heat coming out of these pages?
In a poem dated 1843, Emily wrote:
"Farewell then, all this love
All this deep sympathy
Dors , the sky laughs above
You never miss the land. "
You are wrong, Emily. Two hundred years later, we still miss you.
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Ron Charles writes about books for the Washington Post.
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