Foto dell'autore

Edward Chitham

Autore di A life of Emily Brontë

14 opere 100 membri 3 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Edward Chitham, Education Consultant for the National Association of Gifted Children, and Assistant Staff Tutor, Open University

Opere di Edward Chitham

Etichette

Informazioni generali

Utenti

Recensioni

An 'investigative biography' to balance the many speculative accounts of Emily Bronte's life, past and present - including Emily, the ridiculous 'imagined' biopic from last year, which reduced the Yorkshire author's life and imagination to a fling with William Weightman, Patrick Bronte's curate:

'On the other hand, the effect of having an older brother whom she could surpass if she wished seems to have made Emily contemptuous of most men of her own age and status; she shows respect only to her father and to M. Heger in Belgium, while she despises the curates.'

The speculation and facile romances, however, result from the fact that not much is known about Emily, and Chitham can be equally guilty of falling into the 'trap' of 'using the novel to understand the life, and the life to understand the novel', or at least the poetry. So much analysis of Emily's poetry!

A bit dry and dated - I'm hoping that the line about Anne Lister being an 'alleged lesbian' was changed in the updated edition - but full points to Edward Chitham for sticking rigidly to the available evidence and not making Emily fail the Bechdel Test of her own life story.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
AdonisGuilfoyle | 2 altre recensioni | Jan 22, 2023 |
This is a good, insightful biography on a very elusive character. Emily Brontë left us little personal memorabilia or writings. Rather, we are forced to rely on her fictional works (and what works they are!) and reports from others in trying to understand her. Chitham does a good job in separating fact from fiction, as it were, and also indicates throughout the biography where he is speculating, something that previous biographers have apparently not always done. Of course, our idea of Emily Brontë has also been filtered through the representations Charlotte Brontë made of her. Most early biographers came to Emily with ideas fixed by Charlotte’s descriptions of her, and she also edited and emended Emily’s works, sometimes resulting in unfortunate perversions of Emily’s intention. Chitham is aware of these problems, and tries to keep to Emily’s original intent. Authorial intention is, of course, a nettlesome problem, something which Chitham does not always acknowledge.

Wuthering Heights is one of those monuments to individual genius that escapes mere biographical interpretation. As Chitham says:

The biographer cannot explain Wuthering Heights. The process of using the novel to understand the life, and the life to understand the novel, can easily become circular… What is clear, surely, is that the book is in all ways consistent with Emily’s life as we know it and in particular with her inner life, as that emerges before us in her rare oracular statements, and especially in her poetry.

I agree with that to a degree – the enigma of Emily is that her art, although so personal and idiosyncratic, fails to really reveal her inmost personality. The puzzle is almost of the scope of Shakespeare, whose plays and poetry tell us almost nothing about the artist, except for affirming his genius. Emily did not have the opportunity to create as much true art as Shakespeare –she died at the age of 30. All we have is the monolithic Wuthering Heights and about 200 poems, many of which are only fragments.

This biography gives the bare bones of Emily’s story accurately (I assume) and also some interpretative readings of her poems. The criticism is mostly biographical in essence, and is therefore limited to what is known unequivocally about Emily. One gets the sense of a strong character, but not much more than this. She is also completely different from her siblings – something which can be seen in their writings, to a degree, but also when one reads of their different responses to external stimuli. Charlotte and Anne seem to have adapted to life outside of the Haworth parsonage to a greater extent than Emily. Although she was not the complete recluse that she has sometimes been portrayed as, she was definitely more reserved and ‘shy’ than her siblings.

Chitham is sometimes forced, by the paucity of biographical evidence, to resort to some unconventional, even suspect, methods of analysing Emily’s works. One that I found especially egregious was the way that he correlates the observed meteorological conditions in Yorkshire when Emily dated her poems with the weather represented in the poems. He makes much of it when these conditions coincide, but also when they differ. Now, this just seems absurd to me. One obviously does not necessarily write a poem according to the weather conditions; one could easily write about a storm while the sun is shining outside. Nor is there any proof that Emily wrote each poem in a single day – some obviously took weeks, even months, to write. I also found some of Chitham’s interpretations dubious in the extreme – he likes to infer personal qualities from the poems, and he also uses the relationships between Emily’s fictional characters to posit latent hostilities between Emily and her sisters. Sometimes Chitham also omits bits of the Brontë story which he claims is already well-known. All fine and well if you have read previous biographies of the Brontës, but a bit irritating if you have not.

Despite all that, I found the biography well-written and well-researched. Emily Brontë remains one of my favourite writers, her strangeness and passion always surprising and delighting me. Perhaps, in the end, it is better that she retains some of her mysteries. After all, it is the tale, not the teller, which matters.
… (altro)
½
2 vota
Segnalato
dmsteyn | 2 altre recensioni | Oct 29, 2011 |
I knew I was going to like this biography when Chitham started out in the introduction being very firm about working from facts and clearly identifying speculation. This is especially important in Bronte biography, since so many legends and misconceptions have grown up around all of the sisters, and perhaps particularly Emily. Chitham calls this "investigative biography", and I think he does an excellent job staying true to his standards.

Chitham does take for granted, I think, that his readers are already at least somewhat familiar with the Brontes' story, and so I was happy that I'd read other biographies both of Emily and of the family. I might recommend the more detailed biography by Winifred Gerin to go along with Chitham (though he does identify some instances where even Gerin has apparently accepted tale as fact), but this is on the whole a very enlightening, lucid account of Emily's life. I've already ordered Chitham's biography of Anne and am looking forward to reading it.… (altro)
1 vota
Segnalato
gwyneira | 2 altre recensioni | Feb 8, 2010 |

Potrebbero anche piacerti

Autori correlati

Statistiche

Opere
14
Utenti
100
Popolarità
#190,120
Voto
½ 3.7
Recensioni
3
ISBN
30
Lingue
1

Grafici & Tabelle