Two hundred years after the birth of “Ellis Bell”, it’s disappointing to find that the double standard which led the Brontës to veil their names is still in operation (The Brontë myth, Review, 21 July). Kathryn Hughes leaves it unclear whether or not she made it to the end of Wuthering Heights, but it is the extra-literary quality of the appraisal that concerns me. It is alarming that Emily Brontë is disparaged largely on the testimony of the school bully, who wrote so charmingly: “I simply disliked her from the first; her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure ... always answering our jokes with ‘I wish to be as God made me’”. If Laetitia Wheelwright is to be a key witness then why not Louise de Bassompierre, also taught by Brontë, who apparently liked her very much?
More to the point, why are we still judging a leading novelist (and major poet) on these terms? (Was Thackeray a difficult man? Did Conrad have a Laetitia Wheelwright in his life?) We’ve been here also with Sylvia Plath; the author and her readers (that “cult” – or should it be coven?) are condemned together. This trope is unfortunate to say the least. Emily Brontë did not confide her religious or political beliefs to anyone, so it is puzzling to find her dismissed on the basis of her sister Charlotte’s alleged views (Charlotte having recorded that Emily’s “reason … often travels a different road” from her own) and ahistorical speculation about what she might have made of the suffragettes.
I don’t care whether or not Emily Brontë/Ellis Bell is on my “side”, but I would gladly line up with the poet, philosopher, novelist and essayist who wrote: “Why ask to know the date – the clime? / More than mere words they cannot be: / Men knelt to God and worshipped crime / And crushed the helpless, even as we”.
As for Kathryn Hughes, Charlotte Brontë said it best: she “judged her as a woman, not an artist: it was a branding judgment”.
Emma Jones
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
• In attempting to write an article that apparently seeks to dispel the “Emily myth” and to replace it with Emily “the ruthlessly self-defined artist”, Kathryn Hughes fails remarkably. She may not like Wuthering Heights, a book that she confesses to struggling to finish, but more notably she completely fails to mention the 200 poems written by Emily Brontë, apart from a passing reference to the commercial failure of the Brontë sisters’ combined edition of their poems.
I have just completed a PhD on the poems of Emily Brontë, in which I make the very strong case for a new approach based entirely on her work, and not on insecure biography or on character descriptions, which can only serve to remove the reader’s attention from the power and artistry of both her poetry and her novel.
Hilary Ward (Letters, 24 July) is correct in saying that it would be good to read an article by someone who has enjoyed the Brontës’ books. I would add to this that it would be good to read an article on Emily Brontë that is based on her writing, and is written by someone who has actually read that work.
Tricia Ayrton
Rochdale
• In the year that Kate Bush’s famous hit single appeared, there also appeared an interesting article in the Telegraph & Argus in Bradford, where Patrick Brunty (as it was then spelled) first lived on arriving in England, before he moved to Haworth. A local historian had come across some documents which led her to the hypothesis that Heathcliff was based on a real person from the 17th-century English civil war. He may well have suffered from what we would now call PTSD. So the violence in the novel may well be based on actual recorded events. I imagine that the evidence is still available in Bradford Central Library.
The last time that I saw the first house where the Brunty family lived in Bradford, it was a complete ruin, but the house in Thornton where they moved before going on to Haworth was still being lived in, after failing as a bijou restaurant trying to attract a clientele based on the Brontë connection.
Gary Littlejohn
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
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