Brontë was no romantic child of nature but a pragmatic, self-interested Tory. Why is she still adored for her ‘screeching melodrama’ of a novel?

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Great article. Read all: theguardian/emily-bronte-strange-cult-wuthering-heights-romantic-novel
Far from writing “from the impulse of nature” and “the dictates of intuition” as Charlotte would have it, Emily Brontë was a richly resourced and highly self-conscious literary artist. In particular she was steeped in second-wave Romanticism, which she knew from her father’s fine collection of work by Shelley, Scott and Byron. Another, complementary, set of references came from the mystery and horror of German Romantic literature, which she read in the original. For while the little Wheelwrights were crying their eyes out, Emily was busy poring over her German grammar and reading spooky gothic tales by the likes of ETA Hoffmann. If Wuthering Heights struck contemporary critics as unrecognisably strange, it was only because then, as now, people had very short literary memories. In an age when Gaskell was gearing up to write her Condition of England novels, with their close attention to economic and social injustice in the industrial north, Brontë’s attachment to older gothic models (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an obvious one to set alongside Hoffmann) came over as strikingly odd. It wasn’t that Wuthering Heights was shockingly avant garde so much as wilfully retro, just like the deeply unfashionable clothes that Emily insisted on wearing in Belgium, despite the derisive sniggers of her more sophisticated classmates.

Despite there being two servants to look after the modestly sized parsonage and one modestly sized parson, Emily made a case for needing to be onsite as an extra housekeeper. And to offset her lack of income, she became an expert financial investor, studying newspapers to ensure that the family’s modest savings were placed in the best-performing railway stocks. She was cannily alert, too, to the way that the literary market worked. When the Brontës’ first book, a joint collection of poetry, sold only a handful of copies, she was quick to turn to the much more profitable genre of fiction, in the same way that Plath self-consciously set out to write a “potboiler” of a novel – The Bell Jar – as a break from the slow and thankless business of trying to sell her verse.

In the place of Emily Brontë the wuthery maiden of the moors, we need to put Emily Brontë the ruthlessly self-defined artist. I happen to hate that art – no many how many popularity polls it wins, and no matter how many literary critics point out how cleverly it is crafted, nothing will convince me that Wuthering Heights is anything but a hot mess. But the fact that it exists at all, written in such unpromising circumstances by a woman who was convinced of her right to produce it, has a certain magnificence. Emily Brontë is the patron saint of difficult women. For that alone, she is to be admired, if only grudgingly and from a safe distance.