Wuthering Heights
Summary
Perhaps the most enduring and affecting of the Bront?sisters' work is Wuthering Heights. Emily Bront?s tale of heartbreak and mystery still resonates on an emotional level with its theme of doomed romance. It was written between October 1845 and June 1846, appearing in print finally in December 1847. Emily's sister Charlotte spoke of the "horror of great darkness" surrounding the novel in her memoirs and it only received recognition after Emily's death from consumption in 1848. Much of the first half of the novel concerns the passionate and illicit relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Mr Heathcliff as narrated by a number of individuals: primarily by Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean, the housekeeper of Thrushcross Grange. There is intrigue concerning Heathcliff who has taken over the Grange and keeps a clumsy boy called Hareton Earnshaw. We learn of how his morose and stern attitude began and the cruel twists of fate which have torn two families apart. The death of Catherine and the true intentions of the novel's various mysterious characters have been the source of much speculation and even now Wuthering Heights remains genuinely harrowing and cathartic.
下面是作者简介：
Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is perhaps the greatest writer of the three Bront� sisters - Charlotte Bronte, Emily, and Anne Bronte. Emily Bronte published only one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story of doomed love and revenge. But that single work has its place among the masterpieces of English literature. Some of her best lyrics are also rated with the best in English poetry.
Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her father was the rector of Hawort from 1820. After their mother died in 1821, the children spent most of their time in reading and composition. To escape their unhappy childhood, Anne, Emily, Charlotte and their brother Branwell created imaginary worlds - perhaps inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Emily and Anne created their own Gondal saga, and Bramwell and Charlotte recorded their stories about the kingdom of Angria in minute notebooks. Between the years 1824 and 1825 Emily attended the school at Cowan Bridge with Charlotte, and then was largely educated at home. Her father's bookshelf offered a variety of reading: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott and many others. The children also read enthusiastically articles on current affairs and intellectual disputes in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, and Edinburgh Review.
In 1835 Emily Brontë was at Roe Head, but suffered from homesickness and returned after a few months to the moorland scenery of home. In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. To facilitate their plan to keep school for girls, Emily and Charlotte Brontë went in 1842 to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned on the same year to Haworth, where she stayed for the rest of her brief life.
Unlike Charlotte, Emily had no close friends. She wrote a few letters and was interested in mysticism. Her first novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story-within-a-story, did not gain immediate success as Charlotte's Jane Eyre, but it has acclaimed later fame as one of the most intense novels written in the English language. In contrast to Charlotte and Anne, whose novels take the form of autobiographies written by authoritative and reliable narrators, Emily introduced an unreliable narrator, Lockwood. He constantly misinterprets the reactions and interactions of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. More reliable is Nelly Dean, his housekeeper, who has lived for two generations with the novel's two principal families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons.
Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in the late 1848. She had caught cold at her brother Branwell's funeral in September. After the appearance of Wuthering Heighs, some skeptics maintained that the book was written by Branwell, on the grounds that no woman from such circumscribed life, could have written such passionate story. In 1848 Charlotte and Anne visited George Smith to reveal their identity and to help quell rumors that a single author lay behind the pseudonyms. After her sisters' deaths, Charlotte edited a second edition of their novels, with prefatory commentary aimed at correcting what she saw as the reviewers' misunderstanding of Wuthering Heights. The complex time scheme of the novel had been taken as evidence by the critics, that Emily had not achieved full formal control over her narrative materials. However, her model in layering narrative within narrative may have been Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Emily's refusal to reduce ambiguity to simplistic clarity did not have any immediate influence on the novel form until Wilkie Collins experimented with multivocal first-person narratives in such works as The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).
Wuthering Heights 呼啸山庄
作者简介
艾米莉.勃朗待，Emily Bronte，1818～1848，英国女作家，夏洛蒂·勃朗特之妹，安妮·勃朗特之姐。出生于贫苦的牧师之家，曾在生活条件恶劣的寄宿学校求学，也曾随姐姐去比利时学习法语、德语和法国文学，准备将来自办学校，但未如愿。艾米莉性格内向，娴静文雅，从童年时代起就酷爱写诗。1846年，她们三姐妹曾自费出过一本诗集。《呼啸山庄》是她唯一的一部小说，发表于1847年12月。她们三姐妹的三部小说——夏洛蒂的《简·爱》、艾米莉的《呼啸山庄》和小妹妹安妮的《艾格尼斯·格雷》是同一年问世的。除《呼啸山庄》外，艾米莉还创作了193首诗，被认为是英国一位天才的女作家。
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