"Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree."
-Emily Bronte
The moors we walked that day were blustery, windy, rainy and cold. It was perfect. Few others braved the elements, but we were determined to reach our destination .
The ruins of Top Withens came into sight and I bounded ahead, anxious for a few minutes alone with the place. As I approached, a fierce wind blew through, rattling the one wooden door still in place and startling a baby sheep and her family, which went running away.
I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte had a dog named Keeper.
A romantic name for a canine companion pet to one of the best writers in the English language - very fitting. I imagine him to be her keeper while she roamed those moors beyond the safety of her parsonage home.
"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read."
~ James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847"...wild, confused, disjointed and improbable ... the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer."
~The Examiner, 1847
It's a shame that the authors of these dismissive remarks never knew the success the Brontës' novels have had in the intervening years. Nor that their overwhelming longevity speaks to the universal themes that course through both books. "Love conquers all," would be putting a romance novel spin on them, but really, when it comes right down to it, these two books set the bar very high few "romance" writers since have attained.
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