Introduction

Abstract

If it is no longer fashionable to see the Brontes simply as a marooned, metaphysical trio, sublimely detached from their historical milieu, it is equally true that 'historical' readings of their fiction still evoke a degree of suspicion. Can the measure of that passionate intensity truly be taken by the blundering techniques of some literary sociology? Do we not find in, say, that sense of an ultimate bedrock of being which haunts Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, a supreme instance of great art's resistance to any merely sociological rendering?