Emily Brontë

Robinson, A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances), 1857-19Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.4

Word count: 406K words
Chapters: 41

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Emily Brontë by A. Mary F. RobinsonAuthor: Robinson, A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances), 1857-1944,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 14, 2008

Editor's review

This biography of Emily Brontë by A. Mary F. Robinson is one of the important early texts in Brontë studies. The author was herself a poet and literary scholar, so beyond narrating the subject's life she pays particular attention to discerning and understanding Emily Brontë's character, imagination and creative temperament. Readers can see how a Victorian woman understood another, more isolated woman writer, and this double perspective is itself well worth reading. As a free Project Gutenberg eBook, it is easy to search and check against the original text, making it suitable as a primary or supplementary source for Brontë research. It should be read as a product of its time: it presents the biographical interests of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not contemporary scholarly consensus. For readers who want an outline of the life of the author of Wuthering Heights and to see how early biographies shaped Emily's image, this book offers an accessible entry of moderate length and readable prose.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Literary readers interested in the Brontë sisters and the background of Wuthering Heights
Literature students studying the writing of British Victorian author biographies
English learners who wish to encounter an early biographical text in the original English
University readers who need free public-domain material for course reports or textual comparison

Not a good fit for

Brontë scholars expecting the latest archives and contemporary scholarly conclusions
Readers who only want a quick plot-style life story and are unwilling to read a long English narrative
Casual readers with little patience for nineteenth-century biographical style and indirect narration

Reading tips

Read Wuthering Heights or a summary of it first, then the biography, to better appreciate the author's interpretation of Emily's temperament.
Mark speculative statements in the biography as you read and compare them with contemporary Brontë scholarship to form your own judgment.
Read this book alongside Charlotte Brontë's biographical preface to compare how contemporaries and later readers shaped different images of Emily.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a work written by Emily Brontë herself?

No. It is a biography of Emily Brontë written by A. Mary F. Robinson, a life account by another person, not Emily's original novels or poems. Readers should distinguish the subject's works from the biographer's interpretations.

Why is it said to carry the limitations of an early biography?

The book was written in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, when available archives and methods of verification were limited, and the biography often mixes in the author's own understanding and conjecture. Reading it today means seeing both what it offers and which claims later research has revised.

Can readers with average English read it?

They can try, but it requires some stamina in English reading. This is a public-domain English biography in a nineteenth-century style with long sentences. Reading it with an annotated edition, or starting with Chinese-language material on the Brontës' lives before returning to the original, will be more efficient.

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About the author

Robinson, A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances), 1857-19 Author

A. Mary F. Robinson (Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, 1857–19) was a late nineteenth-century English poet, biographer and literary critic. Public sources on her life are limited. Two of her works are held here. The first, Emily Brontë, belongs to the Victorian tradition of literary biography: it traces Brontë's life and writings in fine detail and has value both as biographical documentation and literary criticism. The second, The End of the Middle Ages: Essays and Questions in History, gathers historical essays and questions, showing that her interests reached beyond poetry and biography into historical writing and cultural criticism. Her prose is elegant and carefully researched, with the unhurried quality of nineteenth-century humanistic essays; students of Brontë and Victorian literature frequently cite her.