At present, Emily Bronte's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Bronte's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Bataille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Bronte had a mystical experience because she 'reached the very essence of such an experience'. Although the book does not discuss all of Bronte's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. For admirers of Wuthering Heights, Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

This volume constitutes the first major edition of Emily Brontë's complete poems to appear for half a century. 'A family in whom appears to run the instinct of song . . . rising, in that of Ellis, into an inspiration,' wrote the Athenaeum, reviewing Poems (1846) by the 'three brothers' Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Twenty-one of Emily Brontë's poems appeared in that volume, passionate songs of the spirit and of nature, and they were the only poems of hers to be published in her lifetime. For this new edition Janet Gezari has arranged the poems as nearly as possible in chronological order of composition, printing the published texts of the 1846 poems but otherwise taking the most recent manuscript versions. She also provides a scholarly introduction and extensive textual and contextual annotations to the poems.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleIn both her life and her art, Charlotte Bronte was alive to the difficulty of responding to attacks that are denied or underacknowledged, so that any defense risks seeming defensive in our modern sense of the word: too quick to take offense or covertly aggressive. For some, Bronte's novels are deformed by hunger, rebellion, and rage; for others, they are deformed by the repression of these feelings. Both views ignore hunger, rebellion, and rage as powerful resources for Bronte's art rather than as personal difficulties to be surmounted or even deplored.Janet Gezari reassesses Charlotte Bronte's achievement by showing the ways in which an embodied defensiveness is central to both the novels and their author's life. She argues that Bronte's novels explore the complex relations between accommodation and resistance in the lives of those who find themselves--largely for reasons of class and gender--on the defensive. Gezari rehabilitates the concept of defensiveness by suggesting that there are circumstances in which defensive conduct is both appropriate and creditable. The emphasis on a different kind of bodily experience in each novel identifies Bronte's specific social concerns in the text; and the kinds of self-defenses at issue in it.This book arrives in the wake of renewed critical interest in Charlotte Bronte, especially on the part of feminist critics. They have substantially revised our understanding of Jane Eyre and Villette, but there have been few studies of The Professor and Shirley, and few book-length studies of Charlotte Bronte's work as a whole. Although Gezari's book is not a biography, she also seeks to revise our sense of Bronte's life by turning attention from its familiar romantic circumstances--the bleakness of the Yorkshire moors and unrequited love--to its less familiar practical circumstances--her struggles as a woman of a certain class and a publishing author. They reveal a woman more embattled, contentious, and resilient, though no less passionate, than the more familiar trembling soul.

Emily Bronte s Wuthering Heights" has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and the wild Yorkshire moors that the characters inhabit. I am" Heathcliff, Catherine declares. In her introduction Janet Gezari examines Catherine s assertion and in her notes maps it to questions that flicker like stars in the novel s dark dreamscape. How do we determine who and what we are? What do the people closest to us contribute to our sense of identity?

The Annotated Wuthering Heights" provides those encountering the novel for the first time as well as those returning to it with a wide array of contexts in which to read Bronte s romantic masterpiece. Gezari explores the philosophical, historical, economic, political, and religious contexts of the novel and its connections with Bronte s other writing, particularly her poems. The annotations unpack Bronte s allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and her other reading; elucidate her references to topics including folklore, educational theory, and slavery; translate the thick Yorkshire dialect of Joseph, the surly, bigoted manservant at the Heights; and help with other difficult or unfamiliar words and phrases.

Handsomely illustrated with many color images that vividly recreate both Bronte s world and the earlier Yorkshire setting of her novel, this newly edited and annotated text will delight and instruct the scholar and general reader alike."

Full of acute observations, pithy character sketches, and passionate convictions, the letters of Charlotte Bronte are our most direct source of information about the lives of the Brontes and our closest approach to the author of Jane Eyre. In them Charlotte writes of life at Haworth Parsonage, her experiences at a Belgian school, and her intense feelings for the Belgian schoolteacher, M. Heger. She endures the agony of the death of her siblings, and enjoys the success as a writer that brings her into contact with the London literary scene. Vivid and intimate, her letters give fresh insight into the novels, and into the development of her distinct literary style. The only available edition, this selection is derived from Margaret Smith's three-volume edition of Bronte's complete letters. In addition to Smith's Editor's Preface, the edition includes a critical introduction by Janet Gezari, who looks at the relationship between Bronte's letters and her fiction and how the letters add to the debate about her literary persona and the split between her public and her private life.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more."

Emily Bronte's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This much-needed study reinstates Emily Bronte's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today.
Last Things presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Bronte's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. Last Things also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

'You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek...you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.' Shirley is Charlotte Bronte's only historical novel and her most topical one. Written at a time of social unrest, it is set during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when economic hardship led to riots in the woollen district of Yorkshire. A mill-owner, Robert Moore, is determined to introduce new machinery despite fierce opposition from his workers; he ignores their suffering, and puts his own life at risk. Robert sees marriage to the wealthy Shirley Keeldar as the solution to his difficulties, but he loves his cousin Caroline. She suffers misery and frustration, and Shirley has her own ideas about the man she will choose to marry. The friendship between the two women, and the contrast between their situations, is at the heart of this compelling novel, which is suffused with Bronte's deep yearning for an earlier time. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.