Let Me In

'Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.
--"I wish I could hold you," she continued bitterly, "till we were both death! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them! Will you say so, Heatcliff?"
--"Don't torture me till I am as mad as yourself," cried he, wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth."'
(from Wuthering Heights)

"The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window."

"Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes..."- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

"Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!" Wuthering Heights

Seeking Emily

"Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. "

"He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine..."

"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation if I were entirely contained here?"

"It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."

"Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it."

" ....may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe — I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:

......

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main…

Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee."

- Emily Bronte

The Bronte family originated in beautiful county Down in Northern Ireland, the Bronte Homeland. Their father Patrick Brontë had been a preacher and a teacher at the tiny village of Drumballyroney.

Patrick Brontë was born Patrick Brunty in 1777. He later moved to England and changed his name to Brontë.

Remains of Bronte cottage.

No one knows for sure why. Some suggest that he might have wanted to hide his humble origins while others point out that, being a man of letters, he might have chosen the name because of classical Greek influence, since in Greek mythology Brontes means “thunder” and was the name of one of the cyclops.

Patrick spelled his name with a dieresis over the “e” (Brontë) to stress that two syllables are pronounced (and highlight the second syllable as the one accented as in the Greek?).

Church and school house in Drumballyroney.

The school where Patrick taught still stands and has been restored and functions as a little museum. Next to it the old Church of Ireland church where his family attended and where he later preached. From the church grounds you have a beautiful view over the surrounding green rolling hills of Co Down, though on in winter it can be very cold and windy up there.

School where Patrick taught.

Patrick as a young man.

The old church, Haworth.

The Brontë sisters (Anne, Emily and Charlotte, aged about 15, 17 and 19 respectively) painted by Branwell in 1834

Emily only wrote the one novel, Wuthering Heights, although she was working on a second when she died. However, no trace of this book remains. We only know she was writing it because her publisher, T C Newby, sent her a letter dated 15 February 1848 which said:

I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your new work. If it be an improvement on your first, you will have established yourself as a first rate novelist, but if it fall short the Critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be in your own time.

Bronte family tree

Description

Emily had an unusual character, extremely unsocial and reserved, with few friends outside her family. She preferred the company of animals to people and rarely travelled, forever yearning for the freedom of Haworth and the moors. She had a will of iron – a well known story about her is that she was bitten by a (possibly) rabid dog which resulted in her walking calmly into the kitchen and cauterising the wound herself with a hot iron.

She had unconventional religious beliefs, rarely attending church services and, unlike the other children, never teaching in the Sunday School.

In appearance, she was lithesome and graceful, the tallest of the Brontë children (her coffin measured five feet seven inches – 1.7 meters) but ate sparingly and would starve herself when unhappy or unable to get her own way. As her literary works suggest, she was highly intelligent, teaching herself German while working in the kitchen (her favourite place outside of the moors) and playing the piano well enough to teach it in Brussels. Her stubbornness lasted to the end where she refused to see a doctor or rest while she was dying of tuberculosis.

In 1871, Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of the Brontës, wrote of her first impressions of the fifteen-year-old Emily in Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë:

Emily Brontë had by this time acquired a lithesome, graceful figure. She was the tallest person in the house, except her father. Her hair, which was naturally as beautiful as Charlotte's, was in the same unbecoming tight curl and frizz, and there was the same want of complexion. She had very beautiful eyes – kind, kindling, liquid eyes; but she did not often look at you; she was too reserved. Their colour might be said to be dark grey, at other times dark blue, they varied so. She talked very little. She and Anne were like twins – inseparable companions, and in the very closest sympathy, which never had any interruption.

Charlotte famously said of her sister:

Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.