Emily Bronte

Okay.

Hi,

I'm Dr Alfie Bowne and lecturer and teacher at the

University of Manchester specialist in the 19th century literature.

So it's a pleasure to be giving you the first

of two lectures on Weathering Heights by Emily Bronte.

I've also provided to lectures on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte,

and I made just at times gesture towards some of those lectures.

Of course, two novels written in the same year, Weathering Heights and Jane Eyre

Risk, both written in 18 47.

Of course, there are many crossovers between the two,

as there are crossovers between Emily

and Charlotte's upbringing and their biography.

So if you want a few more biographical details,

do do do listen to section one of my first lecture on Jane Eyre when I give some of those

specifically, I do want to say a few things about Emily.

She was born in 18 18 and died in 18 48 aged just 30

and this was one year after

Weathering Heights was published. So

weathering heights she was encouraged to publish,

she was actually still editing the text,

and she was encouraged to publish it by the massive success of Jane Eyre,

her sister's novel

and that that means that she pushed it out early and then then passed away.

And actually, it was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell,

which is deliberately designed to be a sort of not a gender specific

first name so that the readership wouldn't know it was a woman writing,

as as had happened with previous publications by the Brontes.

But it's interesting that she wanted to actually edit, continue editing the text.

And actually, Charlotte Bronte, I believe,

edited a new version and that was published posthumously after Emily died.

So those are interesting things to bear in mind.

Along with the other biographical details, Um, I mentioned in the previous

Jane Eyre lecture.

That's, you know, biography can be a problematic way of reading a text,

and actually we can.

If we try to explain the text using the author's biography, we can often limit

and what the text is really doing. Sometimes the text do far, far more

than the the author intended or than the author's life.

I would suggest they were capable of doing,

and I think that it's important to refer back to that

here because Emily Bronte is a great example of that.

I mean, Charlotte Bronte writes about her schools and being a governess,

and her travels in Belgium and these all things that Charlotte Bronte, the author,

actually did.

But Emily Bronte's text Weathering Heights is nothing to do with

Emily Bronte's life for nothing directly to do with it anyway.

Emily Bronte lived in Howarth, which is an amazing place to go and visit.

If you want to learn a lot about the Broncos,

you can see how they were writing on

incredibly small manuscripts, the sort of book about two inches

in length

at the most

and how they were just passionate writers passionate about

storytelling from the youngest age from the age of 678

and Emily's was, I'm not sort of saying this just in praise of her imagination.

It's just that the text goes far beyond

what the biography of Emily Bronte could explain.

So it's a text that, once we delve into it in these lectures,

will really be leaving a lot of this biographical information behind.

One thing that is relevant is the idea of upbringing and childhood. Um,

and I think it's relevant indirectly,

whereas in Jane Eyre is relevant quite directly.

Um, uh, Emily Bronte.

I want I would like to talk about as quite an early 19th century writer,

and that's surprising when she's when she's writing in 18 48.

But I think you know this period 18 thirties, 18 forties.

It marks the end of what we call Romanticism,

and I'm going to be talking about romanticism in the next section.

Um,

but what what often happens is that we

look at the context of an author's publication.

So we look at 18 48 because this is when

the novel was published and we think about the 18,

the mid 18 hundreds, because the novel was published in the mid 18 hundreds,

but actually for me, and this is my own personal argument you could disagree with.

My argument would be that Weathering Heights

is a novel completely informed by Romanticism,

which is the period running up to the 18 thirties.

So

and that is that, of course, the time Emily Bronte was growing up in.

So when Emily Bronte was a young girl

and a young woman, we were still in the in the realms of Romanticism,

and I think there's actually a critical neglect

of that in people's in Writing about text,

Emily Bronte was formed as a writer during a

time she would have been saturated with romantic,

the ideas of Romanticism.

So perhaps those are the ones which she takes on and uses in her novel.

And I think that's what I'd like to stress in this, especially if you think about

the importance of upbringing.

Uh,

the only other biographical thing to say there is

the Brontes were obsessed with that bringing they actually,

As I've said in the Jane Eyre lecture,

they actually started their own school because for them, uh, your formative years,

your childhood years were the most the most important ones.

And they were your formative years, the ones which formed you.

And I think Emily Bronte's novel is

completely formed and structured by romanticism,

and I'll be pursuing that in the next section.

Following that, I'm going to talk about Heathcliff, who you know,

is a popular romantic figure,

and I'm going to offer to readings of

Heathcliff in light of these discussions of romanticism.

Um, the first of those is going to look at Heathcliff as a romantic,

and obviously that's how he's been

sort of idolised by cinema and film,

and I'm going to pursue why and how he's a

romantic and how that relates to actual ideas of romanticism.

Um,

in the in the in the section following, uh,

I'm going to talk about Heathcliff as a figure of real fear,

actually a figure that we really are, who's scary, who's dangerous,

a figure of danger and fear.

And I think they're They're a different set of reasons for that.

And Heathcliff.

He's got this kind of strange double nous where he is on the one hand,

this figure who is much desires

and idolised and idealised, uh, and romantic.

And on the other hand, a figure who is unusual, dark, even degenerates,

dangerous and untrustworthy.

So you've got this kind of double nous,

which I'm going to treat into discrete sections before offering

some conclusion as to what this all teaches us about.

Weathering heights as an awful