Emily Bront"e Selected Writings

Emily Bront"e is one of the few modern writers in English whose distinction as a novelist is matched by her distinction as a poet. She lived and died more or less completely out of the public eye and only towards the end of the nineteenth century was her writing widely recognized. Wuthering Heights (1847) and the small but vital corpus of poetry have subsequently become some of the most celebrated writing in nineteenth-century literature. This new edition in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series presents Emily Bront"e's work as it was first known to the reading public, together with what manuscript evidence survives of what she had originally intended. It also reproduces the slender amount of personal writing that Emily Bront"e left behind and both early criticism and early poems about her. Emily Bront"e's sister Charlotte was significant in the initial reception of Emily's work, and this edition allows the reader to see Charlotte Bront"e's interventions into her sister's texts and to evaluate them. Centrally, though, this edition is about how Emily Bront"e, a remarkably original voice in literature, was first read. Here, primarily, is the Emily Bront"e in and of her own lifetime.

i - Currer Bell [Charlotte Bront"e]'s accounts in 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Agnes Grey'. By Ellis and Acton Bell. A New Edition Revised, with a Biographical Notice of the Authors, a Selection from their Literary Remains, and a Preface, by Currer Bell (1850)
ii - Early Poems About Emily Bront"e
iii - First Criticism

Francis O'Gorman was educated at the University of Oxford and held a chair at the University of Leeds; he was then Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh until his retirement in 2022. He has written or edited twenty-four books, mostly on English Literature 1780-1920. He is currently working on a major new project on the literature of London and writing more about music. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.