Brontë 200
- Making Thunder Roar: Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë is one of the greatest writers in English literature, and yet very little is actually known about her. What we do know survives as fragments of information from the people who knew her best, while years of fascination by her biographers have introduced speculation and myth to fill the gaps in our knowledge. To mark the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, this exhibition invites a number of well-known Emily admirers to share their own fascination with her life and work. Specially commissioned contributions from Maxine Peake, Lily Cole and Helen Oyeyemi amongst others result in a thoughtprovoking selection of Emily’s possessions, writing and artwork as well as some of the well-loved household objects she used daily. These personal responses to Emily acknowledge the gaps in our understanding about this intriguing writer, but also encourage fresh perspectives on her life and work. bronte parsonage
I think you know there is a great dispute going on in nowadays "Bronteland". If you don't know what I'm talking about search on Google "Nick Holland" or "Lily Cole". In all of the reactions on the social media and in the newspapers I found one response from someone and suddenly I realised: "That is my question as well".
"Where is Emily Bronte in all of this"
This year I publish all kind of interesting information concerning Emily Bronte
I start with the excellent blog of Nick Holland
Did Emily Brontë Write A Second Novel?
We are now half way through the first month of 2018 (tempus fugit), which is of course the year above all other years that we remember the brilliant Emily Brontë. Her writing has captured the imagination of the world for a hundred and seventy years, but in many ways she remains an enigma. She didn’t make pronouncements on politics or the society of her time, she wasn’t a letter writer, she hardly interacted with other people at all when she could avoid it – to Emily Brontë, writing was everything. One of the greatest mysteries surrounding her life is why she only wrote one novel, the brilliant Wuthering Heights, and there has long been speculation over whether she had commenced or completed a second novel?
The evidence for a second prose work by Emily is found in a letter from Thomas Cautley Newby dated 15th February 1848. The letter, now part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum collection, is addressed to Ellis Bell and reads:
‘I am much obliged by your kind note & 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 new 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.’
Newby was the man who had published both Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, although he believed the writers to be called Ellis and Acton Bell. It is often said that Newby may have meant to address this letter to Anne Brontë, Acton Bell as he knew her, as she went on to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for him. This seems unlikely to me, however, as although he deliberately caused confusion about the Bell’s names when trying to sell rights to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in America (causing Anne and Charlotte Brontë to make their ill fated journey to London in the summer of 1848) he was above all else a businessman focused on making money and therefore unlikely to mix his authors up. The greatest proof is that the letter was found within Emily Brontë’s writing desk after her death, so it seems clear that it was intended for her, and that she had at least considered writing another novel. If Emily Brontë did write at least some part of a second novel, what happened to it?
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