In 1846 a small book entitled "Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell"appeared on the British Literary scene. The three psuedonymous poets, the Bront? sisters went on to unprecedented success with such novels as Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and Jane Eyre, all published in the following year.

As children, these English sisters had begun writing poems and stories abotu an imaginary country named Gondal, yet they never sought to publish any of their work until Charlotte's discovery of Emily's more mature poems in the autumn of 1845. Charlotte later recalled: "I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting....I looked it over, amd something more than surprise seized me -- a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music -- wild, melancholy, and elevating."

The renowned Hatfield edition of "The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bront?" includes the poetry that captivated Charlotte Bront? a century and a half ago, a body of work that continues to resonate today. This incomparable volume includes Emily's verse from "Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" as well as 200 works collected from various manuscript sources after her death in 1848. Some were deited and preserved by Charlotte and Arthur Bell Nichols; still others were discovered years later by Bront? scholars.

Originally released in 1923, Hatfield's collection was the result of a remarkable attempt over twenty years to isolate Emily's poems from her sisters' and to achieve chronological order. Accompanied by an interpretive preface on "The Gondal Story" by Miss Fannie E. Ratchford, author of "The Bront?'s Web of Childhood," the edition is the definitive collection of Emily Bront?'s poetical works.

Although the Brontes have long fascinated readers of fiction and biography, their poetry was all too little known until this pioneering selection by Stevie Davies, the novelist and critic. Charlotte (1816-1855) is certainly a competent poet, and Anne (1820-1849) developed a distinctive voice, while Emily (1818-1848) is one of the great women poets in English.
All three sisters, as Stevie Davies remarks in her introduction, were Romantic in inspiration, writing poetry of passionate personal feeling and of pure imagination. They share certain themes-liberty, loneliness, love-and harbor the myth of a lost paradise. Read together with their novels, the poems movingly elucidate the ideas around which the narratives revolve. And they surprise us out of our conventional notions of the sisters' personalities: Emily's rebelliousness, for example, is counterbalanced here by great tenderness.
This selection of over seventy poems gives an idea of the variety of thought and feeling within each author's work, and of the way in which the poems of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect each other.

In 1846 a small book entitled "Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell"appeared on the British Literary scene. The three psuedonymous poets, the Bront? sisters went on to unprecedented success with such novels as Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and Jane Eyre, all published in the following year.

As children, these English sisters had begun writing poems and stories abotu an imaginary country named Gondal, yet they never sought to publish any of their work until Charlotte's discovery of Emily's more mature poems in the autumn of 1845. Charlotte later recalled: "I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting....I looked it over, amd something more than surprise seized me -- a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar music -- wild, melancholy, and elevating."

The renowned Hatfield edition of "The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bront?" includes the poetry that captivated Charlotte Bront? a century and a half ago, a body of work that continues to resonate today. This incomparable volume includes Emily's verse from "Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" as well as 200 works collected from various manuscript sources after her death in 1848. Some were deited and preserved by Charlotte and Arthur Bell Nichols; still others were discovered years later by Bront? scholars.

Originally released in 1923, Hatfield's collection was the result of a remarkable attempt over twenty years to isolate Emily's poems from her sisters' and to achieve chronological order. Accompanied by an interpretive preface on "The Gondal Story" by Miss Fannie E. Ratchford, author of "The Bront?'s Web of Childhood," the edition is the definitive collection of Emily Bront?'s poetical works.