Emma Francis (Essay Date 1991)

SOURCE: Francis, Emma. "Is Emily Brontë a Woman?: Femininity, Feminism, and the Paranoid Critical Subject." In Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, edited by Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell, pp. 28-40. London: Pinter, 1991.

In the following essay, Francis looks at the avant-garde aspects of Brontë's work to consider how her poetry confounds a conventional feminist reading.

The critical history of Emily Brontë's poetry is a history of evasion. The vast body of work which advertises its subject as 'Emily Brontë' is, in fact, almost wholly engaged with Wuthering Heights (1847) (Brontë 1965). Where her poetry is read, the cacophony of other poetic voices almost invariably invoked when speaking of her work—ranging through the canon of male romanticism and its antecedents such as Milton—is at its loudest. That these comparisons function not to elucidate her poetics...