Emily Bronte Part V

 Emily seems to have been a lot happier once she came home and devoted herself to keeping house and to her writing.  Charlotte's second spell in Brussels was not successful.  She fell in love with M Heger, the husband of the mistress of the school and although the relationship was quite innocent, she ended up coming home, and being miserable for some time afterwards.  She was so inexperienced in matters of the heart that she may not have realised that she was falling in love with a married man.  Emily however never seems to have cared for any real life man or anyone apart from her sisters and her father and brother. She observed the few people that she knew well and mulled over their emotional attachments. She dwelt on the intense passionate loves that she saw or heard about, and what she read in books and heard in stories about the Yorkshire people.. so that while inexperienced in love, she pondered on it and wrote about it. 

She heard stories of the past in Yorkshire, from her father and Tabby Ackroyd, the housekeeper who had nursed most of the children... about family feuds and love affairs and these all went into the cauldron out of which she created Wuthering Heights. 

Emily's family were going through a difficult time in the years after her return from Brussels.. but she herself was contented with her work as housekeeper and writing more and more.  Charlotte was unhappy about her friendship with Heger having ended in disaster and while the girls still tried to set up their school, they didn't get any interest.  The parsonage was small and remote and it was clear that the school scheme would never come to fruition. The girls discussed their writing at the end of each working day, talking and walking around the parlour, but Emily was secretive and did not share all her poetry even with her sisters.  One day Charlotte accidentally came across some of her poems and was struck by how good they were, as she said “ they were unlike the poetry women generally write”.  Emily’s work was rough hewn and intensely emotional.

With the failure of the school project, Charlotte was desperate for something active to do, and she tried to persuade Emily that the poems were good and should be published.

Emily was angry at her privacy being intruded on, but Anne produced some of her poems and indicated that she would be interested in trying to get them published.  Emily took some persuasion but she gave in and the girls began to work on their poetry, editing their work and choosing the best ones of all three of them.

They found a publisher but the work failed.  It attracted a little critical attention but only sold 2 copies.  Emily was by now working on Wuthering Heights, her one serious work, and was less bothered by the disappointment than was Charlotte.  Charlotte was always the ambitious sister, willing in spite of her shyness, to engage with the world and to try and make her work public.