![]() Is it time for me to go to Haworth? That’s a long way away. ![]() I’ve seen Willa Cather’s desk, Bess Streeter Aldrich’s desk (and her buffalo robe!), Louisa May Alcott’s desk, Dickens’ standing desk… But not the Brontes’ desks! There’s something about old houses, and looking at writers’ possessions. Her novels about the Midwest, written in the early twentieth century, perfectly captured what I was feeling that very cold winter.ĭo you like literary museums? This would be a good year to visit them. And I fell in love with Willa’s books when I was living in a cold, tiny, rented room my senior year of college. I’ve been consistent since age 12 about loving the Brontes: my favorite book used to be Emily’s Wuthering Heights now it’s Charlotte’s Villette. In my mind I’m already roaming Emily Bronte’s moors and Willa Cather’s prairie. This year I am reading novels, biographies, and letters to prepare for two significant literary anniversaries: the bicentenary of Emily Bronte’s birth (July 30), and the 100th anniversary of the publication of Cather’s My Antonia (Sept. Enough!įortunately, an hour’s uninterrupted reading of a book puts me back together again. These social media platforms promote racism, sexism, fake news, blacklisting, and misinformation. I am so tired of celebrities’ tweets, which newspapers now reprint to entice readers. Snipping the chains of convention, Wuthering Heights was declared uniquely powerful, yet so savage and morally repellent that it was to plunge Ellis Bell, like it or not, into the public forum.Social media can be draining. She sternly adhered to her own sense of morality from which she would not waver, not even to appease her extremely vexed sisters. Emily was like a small volcano, dormant yet restlessly bubbling, and erupting through the words and actions of her chosen characters. She created a heroine spawned from interesting winds, reflecting her own emotional range, from inner waywardness to the deep restraint of self-deprivation. Charlotte and Anne’s protagonists sought redemption, equilibrium. Those who are not passionate are pallid, and those languishing from passion develop a color of their own – that of death. She drew from her restive pulse and unleashed the unquiet apparition of Catherine Earnshaw, whose pale fingers reached from the grave as if to paralyze the breath of her soul’s predestined mate. Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre each would be obliged to overcome numerous trials before securing constant and fulfilling love-on-earth by book’s end.Īnd what hath Emily wrought? No such earned splendor. In an act of proud defiance, Charlotte created the small, plain and beloved Jane Eyre. Anne offered her own double with the gentle, empathetic Agnes Grey. At the ink-stained table, scarred in the center with a candle-burn the size of a small hand, each conceived of her heroine – drawing from the sap of their particular situations. They had written since childhood a form of comradely self-entertainment, inventing scandalous histories, warring countries, dueling kings – their own game of thrones. Through the endless winter of 1847 the Brontë sisters paced, sparred and provoked one another. Patti Smith, the singer-songwriter and poet, has written a new, lyrical introduction to this edition, in which she sums up Emily Brontë’s complex gifts.Īn extract from the introduction to Wuthering Heights by the acclaimed musician and poet Patti Smith Wuthering Heights defies easy classification and stands alone as a uniquely powerful novel that transcends genres. The singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist will be tomorrow, October 11, at the McNally Jackson bookstore (52 Prince Street, between Lafayette & Mulberry, New York) signing copies as a part of the New Yorker Festival:ĥpm: the Folio Society presents Patti Smith signing Wuthering Heights The Folio Society presents a new edition of Wuthering Heightswith illustrations by Rovina Cai and introduced by Patti Smith.
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