Selected Poems
The Bronte Sisters
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 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 harbour 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 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.
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 harbour 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 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.
About the author
Anne Bronte was the youngest Bronte, and like her siblings was educated at home. Her religious melancholic tendencies are thought to have been influenced by her Aunt Branwell. She was especially close to Emily as a child and they created Gondal, an imaginary world, where many of their dramatic poems were set. She often drew inspiration from her own experiences, this is particularly clear in the novel "Anne Grey". Her pseudonym was Acton Bell and a number of poems were published under this name. Charlotte Bronte is best known for her novels, "Jane Eyre" (1847), "Shirley" (1849), "Villette" (1853) and "The Professor" (1857). A collection of poems by Charlotte and her sisters Emily and Anne was published in 1846. Emily Bronte is best known for her novel "Wuthering Heights" (1847).