On the 30th July, 1818 the English writer and literary scion Emily Bronte was born. She was the fifth sibling in an illustrious and talented family, her elder sister Charlotte spoke of her as “a native and nursling of the moors”. The Brontes lived amidst the foreboding presence of the Yorkshire moorland, literally inhabiting a landscape that almost had human characteristics of its own.
This distinctive environment shaped the young Brontes. It was a major influence on their writing. A profound sense of time and place provided the inspiration for their most famous works. They were also the inheritors of a new literary sensibility which elevated the natural world to a semi-mythic status.
This is evident in Emily Bronte’s poetry, an all pervading feeling of awe and magic imbues her verse, as she expounds,
“Almighty ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest
As I undying Life, have power in Thee!”
In contrast, another poem is much darker and fatalistic, as she laments,
“O for the time when I shall sleep
Without identity,
And never care how rain may steep
Or snow may cover me!”
Bronte was an unmistakable part of the wilderness of Yorkshire, and this native and wild spirit inspired the figure of Catherine Earnshaw, the main protagonist in her stark and Gothic novel “Wuthering Heights”.
Earnshaw’s short but eventful life is as fateful as the creatures that inhabit the heath. It is as tragic and as bleak as the surroundings suggest, to “wuther” means to “howl” or “eddy”. This landscape is open and bare, with black hollows and crags. Wind and rain are perennial features in this cold and forbidding location. It is a perfect place for ghosts to roam.
However it is her doomed romance with Heathcliff that ultimately seals her fate. Heathcliff, haunted by Cathy’s ghost, succumbs to death himself. Yet, as the novel concludes, the torment that afflicted these characters soon ends,
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
The protagonists, cursed by their mortal enemies have finally returned to the land that gave them life, and now preserves their memory for eternity.
Bronte herself had a short, tragic but eventful life. She died from tuberculosis aged just thirty. However her startling precious literary talents are her greatest legacy. It must be acknowledged that she owed a debt to the stunning Yorkshire landscape that breathed life into her work.
Ponderings 