Editing Emily Brontë (section)

==Personality and character==
[[Image:Emily Brontë cropped.jpg|thumb|Portrait painted by [[Branwell Brontë]] in 1833; sources are in disagreement over whether this image is of Emily or Anne.<ref name="Portrait" />]]
Emily Brontë's solitary nature has made her a mysterious figure and a challenge for biographers to assess.<ref>Lorna Sage ''The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English'' (1999), p. 90</ref><ref>Claire O'Callaghan, Emily Brontë Reappraised (2018), p. 5</ref><ref>U. C. Knoepflmacher, ''Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights'' (1989), p. 112</ref> Except for [[Ellen Nussey]] and Louise de Bassompierre, Emily's fellow student in Brussels, she does not seem to have made any friends outside her family. Her closest friend was her sister Anne. Together they shared their own fantasy world, Gondal, and, according to Ellen Nussey, in childhood they were "like twins", "inseparable companions" and "in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption".<ref name="Fraser 39">Fraser, ''A Life of Anne Brontë'', p. 39</ref><ref name="Barker 195">Barker, ''The Brontës'', p. 195</ref> In 1845 Anne took Emily to visit some of the places she had come to know and love in the five years she spent as governess. A plan to visit [[Scarborough, North Yorkshire|Scarborough]] fell through and instead the sisters went to [[York]] where Anne showed Emily [[York Minster]]. During the trip the sisters acted out some of their Gondal characters.<ref name="Barker 451">Barker, ''The Brontës'', p. 451</ref>

Charlotte Brontë remains the primary source of information about Emily, although as an elder sister, writing publicly about her only shortly after her death, she is considered by certain scholars not to be a neutral witness. [[Stevie Davies]] believes that there is what might be called "Charlotte's smoke-screen", and argues that Emily evidently shocked her, to the point that she may even have doubted her sister's sanity. After Emily's death, Charlotte rewrote her character, history and even poems on a model more acceptable to her and the bourgeois reading public.<ref>{{cite book|first=Stevie |last=Davies|title=Emily Brontë: Heretic|publisher=Women's Press|year=1994|page=16}}</ref> Biographer Claire O'Callaghan suggests that the trajectory of Brontë's legacy was altered significantly by [[Elizabeth Gaskell]]'s [[The Life of Charlotte Brontë|biography of Charlotte]], concerning not only because Gaskell did not visit Haworth until after Emily's death, but also because Gaskell admits to disliking what she did know of Emily in her biography of Charlotte.<ref>{{cite book|last=Gaskell|first=Elizabeth|title=The Life of Charlotte Brontë|publisher=London: Penguin Classics|year=1997|pages=229}}</ref> As O'Callaghan and others have noted, Charlotte was Gaskell's primary source of information on Emily's life and may have exaggerated or fabricated Emily's frailty and shyness to cast herself in the role of maternal saviour.<ref name="Callaghan 2018">{{cite book|last=Callaghan|first=Claire|title=Emily Brontë Reappraised|year=2018|publisher=Saraband |isbn=9781912235056}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Hewish|first=John|title=Emily Brontë: A Critical and Biographical Study|publisher=Oxford: Oxford World Classics|year=1969}}</ref>

Charlotte presented Emily as someone whose "natural" love of the beauties of nature had become somewhat exaggerated owing to her shy nature, portraying her as too fond of the Yorkshire moors, and homesick whenever she was away.{{sfn|Austin|2002|p=577}} According to [[Lucasta Miller]], in her analysis of Brontë biographies, "Charlotte took on the role of Emily's first mythographer."<ref>{{cite book|first=Lucasta |last=Miller|title=The Brontë Myth|publisher=Vintage|year=2002|pages=171–174|isbn=0-09-928714-5}}</ref> In the ''Preface'' to the Second Edition of ''[[Wuthering Heights]]'', in 1850, Charlotte wrote:
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My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely exchanged a word.<ref>[[s:Wuthering Heights/Editor's Preface|Editor's ''Preface'']] to the Second Edition of ''[[Wuthering Heights]]'', by [[Charlotte Brontë]], 1850.</ref>
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Emily's unsociability and extremely shy nature have subsequently been reported many times.<ref>''[[w:The Ladies' Repository|The Ladies' Repository]]'', February 1861.</ref><ref>Alexander, Sellars, ''The Art of the Brontës'' (1995), p. 100</ref><ref name="Gérin 196">Gérin, ''Emily Brontë: a biography'', p. 196</ref> According to Norma Crandall, her "warm, human aspect" was "usually revealed only in her love of nature and of animals".<ref>Norma Crandall, ''Emily Brontë: a psychological portrait'' (1957), p. 81</ref> In a similar description, ''The Literary News'' (1883) states: "[Emily] loved the solemn moors, she loved all wild, free creatures and things",<ref>Pylodet, Leypoldt, ''[https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iK3wrGdzHO4C&pg=PA152#v=onepage&q&f=false The Literary News]'' (1883) Volume 4, p. 152</ref> and critics attest that her love of the moors is manifest in ''Wuthering Heights''.<ref>Brontë Society, ''The Brontës Then and Now'' (1947), p. 31</ref> Over the years, Emily's love of nature has been the subject of many anecdotes. A newspaper dated 31 December 1899, gives the folksy account that "with bird and beast [Emily] had the most intimate relations, and from her walks she often came with fledgling or young rabbit in hand, talking softly to it, quite sure, too, that it understood".<ref>''[[w:The Sacramento Union|The Record-Union]]'', [http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015104/1899-12-31/ed-1/seq-10/ "Sacramento"], 31 December 1899.</ref>

Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, told the story of Emily's punishing her pet dog Keeper for lying "on the delicate white counterpane" that covered one of the beds in the Parsonage. According to Gaskell, she struck him with her fists until he was "half-blind" with his eyes "swelled up". This story has been called into question by many biographers and scholars, including Janet Gezari, Lucasta Miller and Claire O'Callaghan.<ref name="Callaghan 2018"/><ref>{{cite book|last=Gezari|first=Janet|title=The Annotated Wuthering Heights|chapter=Introduction|year=2014|publisher=Harward University Press|isbn=978-0-67-472469-3}}</ref>{{efn|Brontë's servant Martha Brown could not recall anything like this when asked about the episode in 1858. However, she remembered Emily extracting Keeper from fights with other dogs.{{sfn|Miller|2013|p=203}}}} It also contradicts the following account of Emily's and Keeper's relationship:
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Poor old Keeper, Emily's faithful friend and worshipper, seemed to understand her like a human being. One evening, when the four friends were sitting closely round the fire in the sitting-room, Keeper forced himself in between Charlotte and Emily and mounted himself on Emily's lap; finding the space too limited for his comfort he pressed himself forward on to the guest's knees, making himself quite comfortable. Emily's heart was won by the unresisting endurance of the visitor, little guessing that she herself, being in close contact, was the inspiring cause of submission to Keeper's preference. Sometimes Emily would delight in showing off Keeper—make him frantic in action, and roar with the voice of a lion. It was a terrifying exhibition within the walls of an ordinary sitting-room. Keeper was a solemn mourner at Emily's funeral and never recovered his cheerfulness.{{sfn|Fraser|1988|p=296}}
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[[File:Keeper - from life, Emily Brontë, 1838.jpg|thumb|Keeper, watercolour by Emily Brontë, 24 April 1838]]

In ''Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era'' (1886), Eva Hope summarises Emily's character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage", and goes on to say, "She was painfully shy, but physically she was brave to a surprising degree. She loved few persons, but those few with a passion of self-sacrificing tenderness and devotion. To other people's failings she was understanding and forgiving, but over herself she kept a continual and most austere watch, never allowing herself to deviate for one instant from what she considered her duty."<ref>Eva Hope, ''Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era'' (1886), p. 168</ref>

Emily Brontë has often been characterised as a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic and a visionary "mystic of the moors".<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/emily-bronte-and-the-religious-imagination-9781441166302/|title=Emily Bronte and the Religious Imagination|website=Bloomsbury Publishing}}</ref>