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A Life in 20 Poems
Emily Jane Brontë was born in July 1818; along with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, she is famed as a member of the greatest literary family of all time, and helped turn Haworth into a place of literary pilgrimage. Whilst Emily Brontë wrote only one novel, the mysterious and universally acclaimed Wuthering Heights, she is widely acknowledged as the best poet of the Brontë sisters – indeed as one of the greatest female poets of all time. Her poems offer insights to her relationships with her family, religion, nature, the world of work, and the shadowy and visionary powers that increasingly dominated her life.
Taking twenty of her most revealing poems, Nick Holland creates a unifying impression of Emily Brontë, revealing how this terribly shy young woman could create such wild and powerful writing, and why she turned her back on the outside world for one that existed only in her own mind.
30th May, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
Brimming with lies, hagiography and exaggeration! Elizabeth Gaskell’s sensational 1857 biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë continues to divide historians, critics and Brontë fans over 160 years after its first publication. Some see it as a unique first-hand insight into the…
17th April, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
21st April marks the anniversary of the birth of English novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë. While she lived only 38 years, her legacy – and her celebrity – have remained perennially present. Her 1847 novel Jane Eyre is one of the most enduring texts of the 19th century, a novel…
13th January, 2020 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
January 17 2020 was a special day for lovers of English literature – as it marked the 200th birthday of Anne Brontë. The youngest of the Brontë sisters, Anne was caught for a while in the shadow of her illustrious sisters Charlotte and Emily Brontë but she is finally being recogn…
9th March, 2018 in Women in History
Over two hundred years since the publication of one of the world’s most famous novels, Mary Shelley and her monster are inseparable, but Frankenstein is not the only piece of work she produced during her fascinating life. In fact many of the UK’s most influential women writers ha…
17th July, 2017 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
18 July 2017 was a special day for literature aficionados across the globe, for it marked the 200th anniversary of the death of perhaps the most beloved writer of them all: Jane Austen. It was on this day in 1817, in a modest house in Winchester, that Jane drew her last breath ag…
16th December, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
For most households the week before Christmas is a joyous one filled with happiness and anticipation, but it was rather different for one household on the western edge of Yorkshire in December 1848. Emily Jane Brontë died from tuberculosis on 19 December of that year, leaving jus…
12th September, 2016 in Fiction
September 2016 marked the centenary of Roald Dahl’s birth. The celebrated author wrote many of his most popular books in his garden shed at his house in Great Missenden. Every morning for over thirty years he would travel through the garden to the small brick shed. He wrote in a…
14th April, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
Whether we’ve read it at school or in later life, or seen one of the many film and television adaptations, we all know the story of the plain governess who falls in love with the stern rich master hiding a big secret in his attic. Yet, work of genius though it undoubtedly is, the…
2nd March, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History
2016 was a very special year for lovers of great literature, and of the Brontës in particular, as it marked the 200th birthday of the one and only Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette. She is of course one third of the famous Brontë sisters. Amanda White’s…
