Emily and Wuthering Heights Part 1

Emily is famous for one novel and her poetry, unlike her sisters, she only wrote this one work.  And it does not appeal to everyone.  Charlotte, who lived almost to the age of 40, wrote and published four novels, many stories and some poetry.  Anne, who died around 30, also wrote poetry and 2 novels, Agnes Grey and Tenant of Wildfelll Hall.
It has been said that critically speaking there is only one Bronte –Emily.  Many critics feel that Charlotte’s novels are uneven and in some ways wish fulfilment, and that Anne’s works are slight. But Emily’s one work is a great novel.
I tend to agree. I think that Anne’s works are slight and overly moralistic and that Charlotte (while she has real talent) was often downright preposterous. Jane Eyre has wonderful early chapters about Jane’s childhood, but the later plot shows her lack of knowledge of the upper classes and the bigamy situation, which is probably meant to make Rochester more sympathetic, only makes him ridiculous. Her experience of the world was limited, but she chose to write novels that demanded such knowledge or experience.  She never mixed in “high society” except for a brief time after her first novels were published.  As a child, she wrote from imagination and reading the newspapers, and in Shirley, she made an admirable attempt to write about the Luddite riots earlier in the century, which meant researching into the industrial and social history of Yorkshire.
However her mixing of stories based in “society” and “real life” with the passionate and wild emotions that were very much part of her character, and which she had written about in her earlier Angrian writings, tended to create very uneven works.
Emily’s one novel is more unified and “all of a piece”.  Unlike her sister, she didn’t bother very much about “normal” social life.  She lived contentedly as almost a recluse, only mixing with her own family… and knowing little of the world other than what she had learned from her short times as a teacher or in Brussels.   So there is not the same divergence between 2 different sorts of writing, in Wuthering Heights.
The novels Is “Gothic” to a large extent but unlike earlier Gothic novels, it is not set abroad in some exotic location, but firmly rooted in Yorkshire. Charlotte and Mrs Gaskell have said that Emily knew nothing of the “world” but she heard old stories of life In Yorkshire, of the well to do farming and small gentry class, at a time when rural Yorkshire was very isolated and people lived in a small circle, and were often obsessed by family feuds going back for years. So the fact that the Earnshaws and Lintons were the only 2 “well to do” families of any social standing, around Gimmerton, is not unrealistic.  By setting her novel in the late 18th century and in the rural wilds of the county, Emily avoided having to deal with “society” which she knew very little about.