Today in fiction
On July 30, Arthur Donnithorne's coming of age celebration.
-- "Adam Bede" (1859)
by George Eliot
From "The Book of Fictional Days"
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Today in literary historyMost accounts portray Emily as the brightest, most intense and most difficult of the three sisters. Even Charlotte's posthumous description seems wary of her: "My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, without impunity, intrude unlicensed." She was certainly the most housebound, preferring her imaginative world of "Gondal," and then later transferring its themes and tortured passions to "Wuthering Heights" and to her poetry. When Charlotte found Emily's secretly written poems in 1845 she thought them "not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write," and with "a peculiar music -- wild, melancholy, and elevating." Many of the poems were written while Emily was in her teens, but given the mortality rate (41 percent by age 6), and the average life expectancy (25), and Emily's own poor health (dead at 30), it is more than teenage complaining to find oneself "As friendless after eighteen years,/ As lone as on my natal day." Reading the poems and then turning to "Wuthering Heights" is to feel before the mysterious Emily as tame Lockwood felt before the glimpse of a life he had outside his window:
"I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window -- terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, 'Let me in!' and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear."
-- Steve King
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