Who was Ellis Bell and what was ‘his’ connection to Emily Brontë

On this day, 30 July 1818, Emily Jane Brontë was born. 

Today we celebrate her achievements – one everlasting novel and hundreds of poems.

When she began her writing career, like her sisters and many other women, she wrote under a male pseudonym – Ellis Bell. She and her two sisters, Charlotte and Anne, published a book of poetry under their respected male names (Currer and Acton, for her sisters). Download a free copy here (their book of poetry is in the public domain).

 

In 1847, Emily’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, was published. It is considered to have “haunting beauty and psychological depth,” and it remains a classic of English literature. Learn more about the novel here. Download a free copy here (public domain).

 

Like her sisters and other members of her family, Emily died of tuberculosis in 1848. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë were published posthumously in 1923. Available here (public domain).

 

Modern Odyssey Books recently published a literature-inspired puzzle book titled In Search of the Brontë Sisters. Discover Emily, her novel, and her poems (and her sisters) and have fun with word search and cryptograms. The books are currently available across all Amazon global marketplaces (for US: here; UK: here).

 

"Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy."

 

Below is one of Emily’s poems, titled A Daydream. Take a moment to read and enjoy and celebrate this inventive young woman from another time.

 

A Daydream

By Emily Brontë

 

 On a sunny brae alone I lay

 One summer afternoon;

 It was the marriage-time of May,

 With her young lover, June.

 

 From her mother's heart seemed loath to part

 That queen of bridal charms,

 But her father smiled on the fairest child

 He ever held in his arms.

 

 The trees did wave their plumy crests,

 The glad birds carolled clear;

 And I, of all the wedding guests,

 Was only sullen there!

 

 There was not one, but wished to shun

 My aspect void of cheer;

 The very gray rocks, looking on,

 Asked, "What do you here?"

 

 And I could utter no reply;

 In sooth, I did not know

 Why I had brought a clouded eye

 To greet the general glow.

 

 So, resting on a heathy bank,

 I took my heart to me;

 And we together sadly sank

 Into a reverie.

 

 We thought, "When winter comes again,

 Where will these bright things be?

 All vanished, like a vision vain,

 An unreal mockery!

 

 "The birds that now so blithely sing,

 Through deserts, frozen dry,

 Poor spectres of the perished spring,

 In famished troops will fly.

 

 "And why should we be glad at all?

 The leaf is hardly green,

 Before a token of its fall

 Is on the surface seen!"

 

 Now, whether it were really so,

 I never could be sure;

 But as in fit of peevish woe,

 I stretched me on the moor,

 

 A thousand thousand gleaming fires

 Seemed kindling in the air;

 A thousand thousand silvery lyres

 Resounded far and near:

 

 Methought, the very breath I breathed

 Was full of sparks divine,

 And all my heather-couch was wreathed

 By that celestial shine!

 

 And, while the wide earth echoing rung

 To that strange minstrelsy

 The little glittering spirits sung,

 Or seemed to sing, to me:

 

 "O mortal! mortal! let them die;

 Let time and tears destroy,

 That we may overflow the sky

 With universal joy!

 

 "Let grief distract the sufferer's breast,

 And night obscure his way;

 They hasten him to endless rest,

 And everlasting day.

 

 "To thee the world is like a tomb,

 A desert's naked shore;

 To us, in unimagined bloom,

 It brightens more and more!

 

 "And, could we lift the veil, and give

 One brief glimpse to thine eye,

 Thou wouldst rejoice for those that live,

 BECAUSE they live to die."

 

 The music ceased; the noonday dream,

 Like dream of night, withdrew;

 But Fancy, still, will sometimes deem

 Her fond creation true.

Latest Pages of April 1st on July 4th

Below are a few recent pages out of the April 1st Project.

But first an excerpt of the description of Woolf Works — a ballet about Virginia Woolf that focuses on Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves — and the inspiration behind it.

For one thing, Woolf herself was fascinated by dance and absorbed aspects of its language into her own creative process to generate writing that was rooted in feeling and the body, as much as in the brain. She famously wrote parts of The Waves while listening to Beethoven on the gramophone and, writing to Vita Sackville-West in 1922, she argues that literary style is ‘all rhythm… Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far far deeper than words’. 

Then, of course, there is the way that her fiction shifts the focus from the outer details of life to the rich inner narrative unfolding continuously within the mind; she plunges us into a world in which events are strung together thematically rather than chronologically, and the fabric of emotion and sensation appears denser than the brittle world of objects. All of this might be seen as the natural territory of dance. ‘The “book itself”’, Woolf argued, ‘is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel’ – and it is certainly true that no other writer’s work reads, sounds or feels like hers.

Woolf’s modernism, moreover, was founded on a deep engagement with other art forms. Apart from dance, she drew on painting, photography, music, film, even astronomy – and it is partly this multi-dimensionality that lends her writing its apparently limitless virtuosity, and makes her world so heightened, vivid and all-encompassing.

Now for the pages: