Bronte, Emily - Vita ed opere

Emily Bronte
She took her name from a little town in Sicily. Emily Bronte was born in 1818 in Yorkshire. Particularly attached to Anne, one of her two sister, she invented a fantastic world which they called Gondal. She published a collected volume of their poems with her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, under pseudonyms, because often only men could publish books. Emily died of tuberculosis in 1848. She was a talented writer. With her sisters, she lived in the countryside, which was different from Jane Austen.

Wuthering Heights
Unlike her sisters, Emily wrote only one novel which is now considered as one of the most singular novel in English Literature.

The novel begin at the middle story, with the entry of one main character and it ended with is death. The two mains character are Catherine and Heathcliff. In general, characters of Emily Bronte’s story are very unusual: they have an intractable attitude and are a combination between wild nature and the wildness of their spirit. In fact the two houses in which the action takes place, Wuthering Height and Thrushcross Grange, symbolize respectively the Romantic world of passion and intense “heights” of feeling, and the neo-Classical world of civility, order and repression on the other. For this reason they don’t accept rules of society and they completely adapt to the kind of landscape environments described by Emily, which is the mood. They see themselves in disquieting expression of nature, like the Byronic hero. This is a typical attitude of Romantic figure. There is the idea of divine energy and the unity of contraries: the union of Cathy and Heathcliff is both impossible and at the same time necessary. In fact Cathy, describing her love for Heathcliff, said “I am Heathcliff”.