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The Writings of Ellis Bell

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Part of the book series: Women Writers ((WW))

Abstract

Just as Emily Brontë eludes the biographer’s attempts to grasp the details of her life, and to reconcile the conflicting versions of the woman that she was, so too her work resists definition and categorisation. Nevertheless, in this chapter I shall attempt to suggest some recurring themes and preoccupations in Brontë’s writings, and to explore the relationship of her work to contemporary writing by both men and women.

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Notes

  1. Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 12.

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  2. Rosalind Miles, ‘A Baby God: The Creative Dynamism of Emily Brontë’s Poetry’, in The Art of Emily Brontë, ed. Anne Smith (London, Vision Press, 1976).

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  3. From the journal of the nineteenth-century American feminist, Margaret Fuller. Quoted in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979), p. 69.

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  4. Cecil Day Lewis, ‘The Poetry of Emily Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions, 67 (1957) pp. 83–9.

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  5. C.W. Hatfield, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (New York, Columbia University Press, 1941 and 1967). References to this edition usually cite the number of the poem followed by a page reference.

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  6. Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 1830–1890 (London, Longman, 1985), p. 10.

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  7. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London, Women’s Press, 1978), p. 100.

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  8. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, World’s Classics edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 86.

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  9. F.E. Ratchford, Gondal’s Queen (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1955), p. 20.

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  10. Stevie Davies Emily Brontë: the Artist as a Free Woman (Manchester, Carcanet, 1983), p. 78.

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  11. Henry James, Lectures on Literature (London, Picador, 1983), p. 5.

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  12. Robin Gilmour, The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction (London, Edward Arnold, 1986), p. 10.

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© 1989 Lyn Pykett

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Pykett, L. (1989). The Writings of Ellis Bell. In: Emily Brontë. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20401-4_2

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