It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event.  It is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement.  But Charlotte’s was not by any means “a chainless soul”.  It struggled and hankered after the unattainable.  What she attained and realized she realized and attained in her imagination only.  She knew nothing of the soul’s more secret and intimate possession.  And even her imagination waited to some extent upon experience.  When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all, wrote of things that might have happened to her.  But when Emily wrote of passion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally was concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be.  It was true enough of Charlotte that she created.  But of Emily it was absolutely and supremely true.

Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfying possession.  It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder would have been a Wuthering Heights born of any personal emotion; so certain is it that it was through her personal destitution that her genius was so virile and so rich.  At its hour it found her virgin, not only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and immaterial event.

And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination, but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her soul.  If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and enduring life.

It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism.  She never speaks the language of religious resignation like Anne and Charlotte.  It is most unlikely that she relied, openly or in secret, on “the merits of the Redeemer”, or on any of the familiar consolations of religion.  As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, consolation would have been the last thing in any religion that she looked for.  But, for height and depth of supernatural attainment, there is no comparison between Emily’s grip of divine reality and poor Anne’s spasmodic and despairing clutch; and none between Charlotte’s piety, her “God willing”; “I suppose I ought to be thankful”, and Emily’s acceptance and endurance of the event.

I am reminded that one event she neither accepted nor endured.  She fought death.  Her spirit lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of weakness with corruption, and turned it to a splendid, Titanic, and unearthly combat.