the guardian moon and her comrade star

Crescent moon with Venus at evening

[Image source: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/246243/what-do-you-call-the-star-that-appears-before-night-evening]


I recently wrote a post about Emily Brontë's earliest dated poem. 


http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/early-poems-by-emily-bronte.html


Here's the poem again:


Cold clear and blue the morning heaven
Expands its arch on high
Cold clear and blue Lake Werna's water
Reflects that winter's sky
The moon has set but Venus shines
A silent silvery star


(In or before July 1836, age 17)


I've been reading Emily's complete poems in chronological order of composition, and now I've reached the other end of her output, some ten years later on. And suddenly there comes a flicker of memory of that early poem:


M.A. Written on the Dungeon Wall - N. C.


I know that tonight, the wind is sighing,
The soft August wind, over forest and moor
While I in a grave-like chill am lying
On the damp black flags of my dungeon-floor --


I know that the Harvest Moon is shining;
She neither will wax nor wane for me.
Yet I weary, weary, with vain repining,
One gleam of her heaven-bright face to see!


For this constant darkness is wasting the gladness
Fast wasting the gladness of life away;
It gathers up thoughts akin to madness
That never would cloud the world of day


I chide with my soul -- I bid it cherish
The feelings it lived on when I was free,
But shrinking it murmurs, 'Let Memory perish
Forget for thy Friends have forgotten thee!'


Alas, I did think that they were weeping
Such tears as I weep -- it is not so!
Their careless young eyes are closed in sleeping;
Their brows are unshadowed, undimmed by woe --


Might I go to their beds, I'd rouse that slumber,
My spirit should startle their rest, and tell
How hour after hour, I wakefully number
Deep buried from light in my lonely cell!


Yet let them dream on, though dreary dreaming
Would haunt my pillow if they were here
And I were laid warmly under the gleaming
Of that guardian moon and her comrade star --


Better that I my own fate mourning
Should pine alone in the prison-gloom
Than waken free on the summer morning
And feel they were suffering this awful doom




[No. 164 in Janet Regazi's edition, dated August 1845.]


* M.A. is a Gondal character, not known from other sources. N.C. : the Northern College. This was indeed a college, where children of the Gondal nobility were educated. But in the Gondal world every building has its dungeon.


Both Emily and Anne wrote "dungeon wall" poems. And in fact Anne's dungeon wall poem of 16 Dec 1844 "Though not a breath can enter here" had introduced the motifs of sensory exclusion and of being neglected by the free world.  Emily's poem meditates further on that. It passes to and fro between the captive's evocation of luminous late summer evenings and the absolute exclusion of those luminous evenings from the captive's present dungeon.


And a drastic choice looms. Since the captive's fate is forgotten by the people above, shouldn't the captive forget the world above? That is to say, forget her/his own memories? That impulse comes from within and we see it's driven by despair and disappointment but also by self-preservation. It's the residual connection with that other life, now thinned to memory, that is torturing.




It was written only a few weeks before "The Prisoner". Self-pity is explicit in this sketchy lyric, while the heroine of "The Prisoner" conspicuously defies self-pity and she mentions no friends upon this earth;  nevertheless, her pitifulness does seem to be an understood thing.




Anyway, "that guardian moon and her comrade star" means the moon and Venus.  The two have been linked since very early times.  As the brightest objects in the night sky, they often seem to have the sky to themselves, particularly during a misty twilight when fainter objects can't be seen. They sometimes appear quite close together: a waxing crescent with the evening star after sunset (as in the photo above), or a waning crescent with the morning star near dawn.  A fairly close conjunction takes place around 8 times a year (about half of them during hours of darkness)






[As on the well-known crescent-and-star symbol on many flags. This is often mistakenly identified with Islam, but Islamic thought deplores visual images, especially for the divine. The crescent-and-star was an emblem of the Ottoman Empire; its origins are pre-Islamic.]


Emily's poems usually speak rapturously of the heavens, and especially of these two comrades. In the sensation-starved and solitary life of Haworth, their appearance in a window was something that mattered. She saw them as nurturers and comforters.

waves of our native soil

Summer weather forecast for Vaasa, Finland

A DAY AT SEA


The oarsman's bronze face
looks timelessly at the summer day.
A sculpture consists of darkness
that reflects the light. Accordingly
it is invisible. Really
only its existence exists, not
it itself. I know the oarsman
well; yet his face is
nameless. When a mountain breaks
among the clouds we turn homeward.
The black sound overwhelms
like the mother's booming pulsebeat
in the foetus. There is no defence
against defencelessness. Through the rain
we see the church towering above the
town.
They punish their unbelief with belief,
says the oarsman. They believe
in what does not exist:
a life after this
and death.


(Gösta Ågren, from Jär (1988), translated by David McDuff as Standing Here (Kindle Book))


*


Jär's epigraph is these famous lines from "The Prisoner" by Emily Brontë: 


Oh! dreadful is the check, intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.


"A Day at Sea" subscribes to Brontë's argument against heaven: life is only meaningful in connection with our world. Brontë uses the word "earth" to express the latter concept. For Ågren, the boat rowing across the low waves of the gulf of Bothnia (Östersjön) does as well, the thunderstorm a mother's heartbeat. This being the life without which there is nothing for us, we are both as secure as the unborn, and as defenceless.


And the oarsman's face, holding still as the boat glides, with the sun shining on it... this face is a sculpture, because it is timeless and because it is immanent in the world, it doesn't belong entirely to Ågren's friend, who after all does have a name. 


(Ågren has also mentioned that he is an admirer of R.S. Thomas, which seems like a good excuse for a Thomas poem with a sea theme.)




*


THE CAT AND THE SEA


It is a matter of a black cat
On a bare cliff top in March
Whose eyes anticipate
The gorse petals;

The formal equation of
A domestic purr
With the cold interiors
Of the sea's mirror.         


(R.S. Thomas)


*


Neither of these poems mentions waves directly. But this is sophisticated poetry. In poems of national pride and patriotism waves are somehow important.


           Britannia rules the waves!


Partly this is something to do with the increased visibility or thereness of a land when you are at its border ("White Cliffs of Dover"...).  A coast makes an unmovable topographical argument for the unique identity of a place and its people.  And then, ever since the Athenians and probably long before. the coherence of local identity often begins with the exploitation of the sea as highway, harvest and battlefield.


With my English-speaking head on, I deplore patriotism and I see states as mere systems of coercion, discrimination and injustice... And in fact I agree with Gösta Ågren's tart aphorism, "If states really existed, there would be no need for borders".


But with my childish Swedish-speaking head on, I'm a helpless sentimentalist and patriot. Which is why, earlier today, I was reading the traditional county songs that appear in Sjung Svenska Folk! And the waves danced and glittered, visibly testifying to the inherent living spirit of each place. 




Känner du landet (SÖDERMANLAND)


Minns du den stranden, där Mälarens bölja
Suckar av kärlek och dansar av lust?


Do you remember the shore where Mälaren's waves
Sigh with love and dance for joy?


Ostgötasång (ÖSTERGÖTLAND)


Så grant står Östergyllen i sommarfager prakt,
Och skördarna, de gyllene, de bölja.
Väl hundra vita kyrktorn på slätten håla vakt
Längs insjöstrand, som glittervågor skölja.


So fair stands Östergyllen in summer beauty's splendour,
And its harvest of gold that swells up.
And a hundred white church-towers keep watch across the plain,
Beside the lakeshore where the glittering waves lap.


Bohusvisan (BOHUSLÄN)


I Bohuslän det gamla
Drog viking över våg
Att segerbyte samla
På dråpligt draketåg.


In ancient Bohuslän
Sailed the Vikings o'er the wave
To win victory
For the mighty dragon fleet


Hallandsången (HALLAND)


Vår kust nu ligger fager
Vid Västerhavets våg
I tidig sommardager
Med böljors glittertåg.
Jag älskar böljesången
Med dur och moll uti
Och doften ifrån tången
Där vindar dansar fri.




Our shore extends so fair
beside the Western Sea's* waves
In days of early summer
With the glittering of the waves.
How I love the waves' song
Its major and minor melodies
And the smell of the bladderwrack
Where the winds dance free.


*i.e. the North Sea, as opposed to the Baltic.

Cold clear and blue




"Cold clear and blue", "Will the day be bright", "Tell me tell me smiling child" and "The inspiring music's thrilling sound",  from a manuscript in Brontë Parsonage Museum Library

[Image source: Janet Gezari's Last Things: Emily Brontë's Poems (OUP, 2007; browse it in Google Books)




Despite living in the the most literary of households we know extraordinarily little about Emily Brontë, except through her writings. She rivals Ann Radcliffe in the inscrutability of her biography, and you might well apply to Emily what Martin Mueller, talking about sources, says about Shakespeare:

The "person" Shakespeare, irretrievable for all practical purposes from either direct utterances or third-party accounts, exists only through a multiplicity of readerly or writerly choices that we can trace with varying degrees of confidence.

("Shakespeare's Sleeping Beauties: The Sources of Much Ado About Nothing and the Play of their Repetitions", Modern Philology Vol 91 No 3 (Feb 1994), p. 293)


And yet, there's a feeling of incongruity, thinking of this in connection with Emily. When do we ever feel we're sharing her readerly choices? Her kind of writing doesn't sit very well with the idea of sources. It seems quite aloof from the literary world. If we ask, frivolously enough, who was Emily's favourite author, don't we feel a dissonance in the terms of the question? We know that Scott, Byron and Shelley were enthusiastically read in the Brontë household, but what did Emily think of them? Did she have favourites?


*


The question arises with what is thought to be Emily's earliest poem:




Cold clear and blue the morning heaven
Expands its arch on high
Cold clear and blue Lake Werna's water
Reflects that winter's sky
The moon has set but Venus shines
A silent silvery star




(Taken from The Complete Poems, ed. Janet Gezari. The date is conjectured to be 12th July 1836 or earlier -- in the MS it precedes another poem with that date. The author was not yet 18. )


According to Lawrence Lipking, "The moon is set" is an allusion to Sappho, well-known in Emily's time as author of the line "The silver moon is set". That is a quotation from J.H. Merivale's (1779-1844) translation of Fragment 48 (in the best-known numbering), published in Collections from the Greek Anthology in 1833.


The silver moon is set;
The Pleiades are gone;
Half the long night is spent,-- and yet --
I lie alone.


Whether the Sappho allusion was intended I don't really know. But if it was, Emily's poem decisively turns away from sexual longing and towards a celestial ecstasy.  Also, Sappho's poem (her authorship has been disputed) is a midnight poem.


In Emily's poem Venus is hovering near the eastern horizon. The moon (evidently a waxing moon some way short of the full) has set in the west at some point during the night. So Emily's poem has a 360 degree view, it is turning its head both to east and west to see what night-time objects are still in the sky, and the answer is, just the one, the planet Venus. 


The form suggests an unfinished poem: the word "star" hangs there, expecting a rhyme that never arrives.  But as the MS shows, the poem is as finished as it's going to be. (Emily did this again in dated poem 26 in Gezari's edition; her poems often resist closure.) You could call it a conscious fragment.


The time of day described in Emily's poem is fairly precise. It must be one hour before sunrise. At that time the sky, especially towards the east, can be a uniform blue.  The growing light is enough to make the stars invisible. Fifteen minutes earlier, and you'd still see other stars. Fifteen minutes later, and Venus too would be little more than a pinprick; moreover, the colour of the eastern sky ceases to be blue as it becomes suffused with the approaching sunrise. (Observations based on a cloudless dawn in Somerset on Oct 27th 2017.)


The poem celebrates a thrill of the present. Dawn is a time of rapid change in appearance.  Lake Werna will cease to reflect, the sky's blue will change, Venus will soon disappear from view. And yet the poem fixes the moment.


The cloudless blue sky recurs in her next two poems, too. (Both on the MS page shown at the top of this post).


*


(2)


    Will the day be bright or cloudy?
    Sweetly has its dawn begun
    But the heaven may shake with thunder
    Ere the setting of the sun


    Lady watch Apollo's journey
    Thus they first born's course shall be --
    If his beams through summer vapours
    Warm the earth all placidly
Her days shall pass like a pleasant dream in sweet tranquillity


    If it darken if a shadow
    Quench his rays and summon rain
    Flowers may open buds may blossom
    Bud and flower alike are vain
Her days shall pass like a mournful story in care and tears and pain


    If the wind be fresh and free
    The wide skies clear and cloudless blue
    The woods and fields and golden flowers
    Sparkling in sunchine and in dew
Her days shall pass in Glory's light the world's drear desert through




 *


(3)


Tell me tell me smiling child
What the past is like to thee?
And Autumn evening soft and mild
With a wind that sighs mournfully


Tell me what is the present hour?
A green and flowery spray
Where a young bird sits gathering its power
To mount and fly away


And what is the future happy one?
A sea beneath a cloudless sun
A mighty glorious dazzling sea
Stretching into infinity




*




















Emily would write poems for the next ten years or so, slackening off when she came to write Wuthering Heights (Oct 1845-June 1846). (Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published at the end of May 1846.) Only ten poems are dated 1845,  then "No Coward Soul is Mine" on 2nd Jan 1846 and the rough draft "Why Ask to Know the Date" on 14th Sep 1846. This last was partially revisited in May 1848.


With that minor exception the final two years of Emily's active life are a complete blank, so far as any literary remains go.  Work may have been destroyed, by Emily herself or another. It's surprising that nobody in the family mentions anything that Emily was writing, but nor do they mention her conspicuous lack of writing... For more on this, see:




http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/note-for-emily-bronte-wuthering-heights.html

another note on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights - Naturalism

Penguin English Library jacket (1970s style) - turning a detail of Branwell's bad picture into an iconic image

[Branwell's painting of 1833-34, commonly referred to as the Gun portrait, showed himself and his three sisters. Emily was 15 or 16 at the time.

The Gun Portrait, from an old photo

Arthur Bell Nichols thought the painting so poor (or so unflattering to his late wife Charlotte) that he destroyed it, retaining only the part showing Emily, who definitely came out best.

Emily, from the Gun Portrait (NPG)

Even so, the portrait is markedly improved by the cracks (which, for instance, make her nose look interestingly snub instead of characterlessly straight). But what above all transformed the effect is the Penguin jacket-designer's crop.  This, by eliminating the back of Emily's head, conceals the Victorian sloping shoulder-line and the languid hair, and creates an altogether more forceful image. Here is a woman, we're convinced, who already has Wuthering Heights in her sights.]

*

This note is about David Daiches' 1965 Introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of Wuthering Heights.

And first some trivia.


DAVID DAICHES

1.  Professor Daiches was an interesting man - read his 2005 obituary in The Scotsman:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/professor-david-daiches-1-720657

His surname (Jewish/Yiddish rather than Scottish) is pronounced  "day chiz"  or "die chiz". That's probably how you pronounced it already, but it's good to know..!


NOVELETTISH

2.  Daiches (referring to an article by Thomas Moser, in which Heathcliff is identified with the Id) says:

This view involves an admission that the latter part of the book - Heathcliff's revenge and its final abandonment, the growth of love between the younger Catherine and a now-civilized Hareton - is inferior and indeed novelettish, the grafting on to the real novel of a conventional moral pattern ... etc etc. 

OED novelette, n. :

1. A story of moderate length having the characteristics of a novel. Now: a short, light, romantic, or sentimental novel (freq. depreciative).

These days the unusual word "novelette" is apparently still used in the world of writing competitions to refer to a fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novella, i.e. 7,500 - 18,000 words, approximately.

But generally the meaning of "novelette" over the past two centuries has been derogatory. Classically it evoked books that were typified by sentimentality, triviality, and trite morality.

The novelette of the 'eighties was a romantic love story, in which the poor governess always married the duke, or the lady of title the gamekeeper,  who always turned out to be a duke or an earl in disguise. Midway through the story there had to be a description of a ball, at which the heroine in her simple white gown attracted all the men in the room; or the gamekeeper, commandeered to help serve, made love to the daughter of the house in the conservatory. The stories were often prettily written and as innocent as sugared milk and water; but, although they devoured them, the women looked upon novelette reading as a vice, to be hidden from their menfolk and only discussed with fellow devotees. .... An ordinarily intelligent child of eight or nine found them cloying; but they did the women good, for, as they said, they took them out of themselves.

(Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, pp. 109-110)

Novelettes might be chauvinistically dismissed as reading material for young ladies or uneducated persons.  The novelette might be regarded as namby-pamby.  A typical example is A.A. Milne's send-up "The Seaside Novelette".

http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/37693/

"Penny-novelettes" were, I suspect, the direct forebears of what my own generation called "Mills and Boon romances". Economics plays a big part in this. The novelette was cheap. Hence it tended to be short and written without much care. Appealing to connoisseurs was out of the question. Originality was out of the question. The skill was to hit off broad effects for a popular audience.

(The word novelette could also be used to mean trashy genre fiction, e.g. a "pornographic novelette").

Read more »

Sir Walter Scott: The Black Dwarf (1816)

The Black Dwarf was published as the first volume of the first series of Tales of My Landlord; the other three were occupied by Old Mortality. Scott doubted if the Black Dwarf material was up to scratch, allowed a friendly reader to confirm his own suspicions, and so brought the curtain down more quickly than he'd originally planned. Here the classic Scott gear-change is more jarring than thrilling.

This, at any rate, is Scott's account of the matter in the final paragraph of his 1830 Introduction. But the Edinburgh University Library page gives a different impression. According to this page the ending was rushed because Scott was being pressured by his new publishers Blackwood and Murray. It also seems to suggest that the original plan for Tales of My Landlord was four one-volume tales. That could be reconciled with Scott's own account only if this plan was a short-lived idea that was already on the scrapheap by the time Scott was composing the The Black Dwarf.  Anyway, Old Mortality was surely conceived on spacious lines from the first.

The main deficiency that Scott talks about is the Black Dwarf himself, and certainly this static creation (Note 1) doesn't convince as a realistic portrait. Nevertheless I'm sure that Scott's insights into the anguish of being cursed with a monstrous appearance must have influenced the young Mary Shelley, who was just starting to write Frankenstein when The Black Dwarf appeared*.

Besides the deficiencies of the lead character, the book has a perfunctory insurrection (how unlike the one in Old Mortality!) and a double kidnap that incomprehensibly fizzles out. So reading the book is more a matter of salvaging lovely details than committing to the tale as a whole. But the details are worth your trouble. This is Scott in 1816, after all!


For a start there's the opening few pages describing the April snow and the sheep-farmers' glorious conversation at Pattieson's village pub (with self-serving intrusions from Jedediah) (Note 2) And that segues very nicely into Hobbie Elliot returning across Mucklestane Moor after an unsuccessful day's deer-stalking, his meeting and conversation with Patrick Earnscliff. Scott is brilliant at evoking the open moor, though he forgets to tells us the time of year (it must be autumn, however).

This excellent start is slightly troubled by a premature jump of nearly a year; when we pick up the action again, with Elshie being now well established in his hovel, it's the following August (the heath is in full bloom).

Elshie's first meeting with Isabel Vere is a moving if rather emblematic scene. Willie of Westburnflat (in conversation with Elshie) is a brief firework.

After the fizzled-out kidnappings, the second half of the book begins - with a clumsy flashback. Nevertheless the scene between Isabel and her father Ellieslaw is good, until it's baldly interrupted with "At this moment four ruffians rushed upon them". The unprincipled Ellieslaw is a pleasing character and so is the attractively quixotic Mareschal, but part of the failing of this second half of the book is that Scott has little definite conception of the third rebel Sir Frederick Langley. This character, we feel, needed to be a straightforward but formidable bad guy. But Scott skimps on devoting any time to introducing Sir Frederick and, when he does bring him on-stage, immediately exposes him to Ratcliffe's unjust accusation, which rather wrong-foots us. Langley does not seem a nice guy, but now he's been blatantly traduced.  Soon afterwards he's heard describing Earnscliff as "a sprightly young fellow". Surely a solidly bad villain ought to hate the hero?  The plot's supposed to turn on Ellieslaw's abject fear of Langley, but what, we wonder, is so fearful about him?  The rebellion never gains momentum; it falls apart at a touch, and we're mainly impressed by the instant willingness of the participants to use treachery as a bargaining tool.

Despite these defects the book achieves a certain dignity in its final pages. Part of that is to do with the Black Dwarf's disappearance and death; no Dickensian conversion here from misanthropy to domesticity. I also like the distorted account of events in Ellieslaw's complacent letter from abroad.


Note 1. I call him static because the early chapters all take place at his croft and because he claims to be too immobilized to think of going to warn Hobbie Elliott about the raid; he has no horse and perhaps his legs are too short to ride one. But towards the end he shows up suddenly at Ellieslaw and I suppose we must assume he was transported there by Ratcliffe.

Note 2. This opening should be understood as following on from Jedediah's splendid "Introduction to the Tales of My Landlord", which these days is usually found prefixed to Old Mortality.

I'm not sure if Scott in the end didn't intend the whole of The Black Dwarf as a sort of fancy portal to OM, with which it is so incommensurate. A recurrent theme in BD is that insurrections, violence, duels and feuds don't really matter; they're all treated lightly and seem to be without serious consequence. In that respect its presiding genii are the reiver Willie of Westburnflat and the wild but honourable rebel Mareschal.

This inconsequence is, of course, in marked contrast to the deadly outcomes of its greater companion.

*

By the way, how on earth could Elshie fail to be recognized as Sir Edward Mauley, given his highly distinctive appearance?



* This is not the first time that The Black Dwarf has been claimed as the source of some better-known book, In 1937 Florence Swinton Dry argued that it lay behind Wuthering Heights. She didn't convince most other scholars, but maybe this is worth further consideration (time for an inter-library loan, maybe?). From what I've heard , Dry's chief argument has to do with The Black Dwarf being "a moorland novel of revenge", which it isn't, really. She also finds some parallels between the misanthropic speeches of Elshie and Heathcliff'; e.g. a not very persuasive parallel in which "worms" and "writhe" are used in close proximity.

When I say it's worth further consideration, I don't mean because Scott's influence is a matter of interest per se. The Brontes had Scott's novels on their shelves and there was no doubt influence of a sort. Dry also proposed that Nelly Dean's name came from Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian - well, who knows, and who cares?

And then Ian Jack spent most of an amiable but perplexing preface arguing that Lockwood derives from the various incomer heroes of Scott's novels (Introduction to Wuthering Heights, Worlds Classics edition). Which only reinforces the conclusion that Lockwood is a very insignificant frame figure who has no role in the action (unlike Waverley, Lovel, or Roland).

The question that matters about Wuthering Heights is its startling originality. How did that come about? And the only reason why it might be worth looking again at Scott (or George Sand, or James Hogg...)  is because it's possible that some ingredient from them might shed light on the mystery of how Emily came to imagine her scenes. Some ingredient that Emily absorbed and worked over in the unconscious. (Because, consciously speaking, the whole atmosphere texture and method of Wuthering Heights is flagrantly un-Scott-like.)


Scott's novels: A brief guide

Note for "Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights" - the lost writings

[Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1992 movie).]

 I probably will write a post about Wuthering Heights one day. But for the moment:

It's always nice to recommend on-line material,  and I think the following is a terrific collection of biographical and critical ideas by Clare B. Dunkle (arising from her researches for a prequel to Wuthering Heights)

http://www.claredunkle.com/Design/maidsbrmaster.htm

She writes about the question of Emily's hypothetical second novel here:

http://www.claredunkle.com/Design/maidsbrmyths.htm#interpreter

Did it exist? 

Emily could have had more than two years for writing a second novel - i.e. from the time that Wuthering Heights was first packed off to publishers (July 1846?)  up to when she became ill on October 1st, 1848 (at Branwell's funeral).


[Can I complain here that Brontë chronologies on the web are incredibly inconsistent? Some say that Emily wrote Wuthering Heights between October 1845 and June 1846, some say it was written from December 1845 to July 1846, others again say it was probably begun in August 1845. Beware how your casual guesswork develops immortality! Again, some say that the agreement with Newby to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey was in July 1847, others say August 1847 - this I'd have thought was a matter of record. Bloom's Notes* clearly states that it was on  July 15th that the sisters agreed to Newby's proposal that they bear part of the production costs.]

Juliet Barker says that Emily and Anne at first reacted to the many rejections of their first novels by retreating into the privacy of Gondal. She thinks both Tenant and Emily's possible second novel were begun around mid-1847. In The Brontës she says (re the coming year - 1848): "there was much to look forward to... Emily and Anne had got their first books in print and were both working on a second novel..."

Dear Sir,--

I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your next work. If it be an improvement on your first you will have established yourself as a first-rate novelist, but if it falls short the critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be at your own time.

Believe me, my dear Sir,
yrs. sincerely,
T.C. Newby

Feb. 15, 1848

Thomas Newby's letter of Feb 15th 1848 implies that Emily had definitely begun a second novel but not yet completed it. Of course Emily was under no compulsion to tell him the whole truth, she might in fact have practically finished it, or again, she might still have been only projecting it. The only thing that seems definite is she told him there was going to be a second novel. (The rascally Newby seems to me to give quite good advice.)

The letter has no addressee name on it, and it isn't absolutely conclusive that the letter IS addressed to Ellis Bell rather than Acton Bell. (It would of course make perfect sense if it was addressed to Anne, then midway through The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.) However, the letter was found in Emily's writing desk. Among other things in this desk there was also an empty envelope from Newby that is addressed to Ellis Bell. The letter and the envelope were separate, but the folding of the letter is consistent with it having arrived in this envelope.

Emily's last dated poem was Sept 14, 1846. So basically there is no known creative work from the last two years of Emily's active life.

According to Bloom's Notes* there is a conjecture that Emily spent some of her last years writing an "expanded version of Wuthering Heights", which of course does not survive. I have no idea of the source of this conjecture.

Charlotte could (as Clare says) have destroyed the putative second novel out of concern for Emily's reputation. "All the evidence suggests it," though, is too strong. It's also entirely possible that Emily ordered its destruction herself. We know she was a perfectionist and we know she had sensitivities about things being published without her control. Also, if Emily did order its destruction then  it might have been Anne she asked, rather than Charlotte. It's all speculation. (Margaret Lane, The Bronte Story, 1953. - quoted here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/198483-was-emily-bronte-working-on-a-second-novel). 

If Charlotte did have any involvement in destroying Emily's last work then that would cast a certain irony on her words in the Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights. 

If the auditor of her work when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects, it was not amenable.  

(By the way, isn't it fascinating to think of Emily reading Wuthering Heights aloud to her sisters?)

Anyway,  Charlotte attributes the shocking aspects of Wuthering Heights to immaturity and claims Emily's writing would have mellowed had she lived. That claim of course does not fit in very well with the hypothesis that Charlotte had to destroy a second novel for being even more shocking than the first.

[This has become, for many, a matter of fact rather than speculation:

We'll never know how Brilliant Emily's next novel was, because her sister, Charlotte, destroyed it.
I believe one theory is that Charlotte was trying to protect Emily's posthumous reputation - the implication being that the second novel might have been even more transgressive than the first.

(Comments by BMacLean in a Guardian comments stream.) ]


I am inclined to believe in Charlotte's good faith here. I think that Emily's second novel never existed or never got very far (or if it did, Charlotte didn't know anything about it).

The disappearance of the Gondal prose writings is almost more painful still, because we know more about them. It's certainly possible that Charlotte destroyed them after the death of her two sisters, though I don't know if she would necessarily have thought them in any danger of being published. It's also possible that Emily and Anne took the decision to destroy them. After all that's the most common fate of adolescent writings - their authors get rid of them.

So I think the claim "Again, almost certainly, Charlotte disposed of them when she went through her sisters' papers" is overstated. Clare infers Charlotte' attitude from some minor edits (e.g. of poems and WH) and her public judgments of her sisters' work, which seem to many so distressingly lukewarm. But I don't know what evidence there may be that Charlotte did do any actual destroying. What I do know is that she didn't destroy the Angria work that she wrote with Branwell, though she might quite reasonably have thought of it as prejudicial to her own and her brother's reputation, if she was the kind of tender-minded tidy-upper who would worry about the Gondal writings. Who knows, maybe Charlotte was the family member who was least exacting when it came to tidying up papers? Against this, of course, you could argue that Charlotte might have been too ill to deal with her own juvenile work in the same way she had allegedly dealt with Emily's and Anne's.

As Ian Jack pointed out, Emily's sole literary remains consisted of Wuthering Heights and the poems, three letters and some remarks or opinions conveyed by family and acquaintances.

Coming back to the other side again, Charlotte re-edited Wuthering Heights in 1850, and though she made unauthorized changes to paragraphing and to the rendering of Joseph's dialect, her main intention was to put right the many errors in Newby's edition (Newby having ignored Emily's list of corrections). Was this evident care for her sister's work compatible with obliterating the bulk of her other writings? Perhaps. "'Wildfell Hall' it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve." There's a sinister ring to that remark. Suppression, though in this case impracticable, was apparently something Charlotte viewed without qualms.

Perhaps as a result of proprietorial remarks like that, we tend to assume Charlotte the famous novelist would naturally feel that she had control over the manuscripts left behind by her sisters. That may be right, but it is rather a big assumption. The unquestioned head of the family and the inheritor of Emily's and Anne's manuscripts would of course be her father, Patrick Brontë. (Charlotte's manuscripts, on the other hand, became the property of her husband, who published The Professor.) So perhaps it was Patrick who destroyed the Gondal prose and Emily's "second novel"; or again, he might have acted in collusion with Charlotte while she was still alive. There are doubtless facts here of which I'm ignorant.

We need to remember that we don't know. It's always tempting to put well-known individuals into the frame, just as anti-Stratfordians always imagine a nobleman must have written Shakespeare's plays, in line with Scott's observation :   "..vulgar fame, which is always disposed to ascribe remarkable actions to a remarkable name..." (1830 Introduction to A Legend of Montrose). But Emily's and Anne's papers could have disappeared or been destroyed without Charlotte's involvement, especially after Charlotte's death. Persons responsible unknown.

* Harold Bloom, ed. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Notes), 1996. I found this online, but I can't track it down again.