Description: The British Library boasts the world's largest collection of original manuscripts, as well as an outstanding collection of letters, personal diaries, first editions, and other literary treasures. The titles in this series take full advantage of this vast source of documentary evidence by illustrating each of these lively writers' biographies with state-of-the-art facsimile of pertinent documents and reproductions of art from the period. Penned by expert biographers, each of these books also contains an index, further reading list, and a chronology of the writer's life.

Largely self-educated, Emily Bronte (1818-1848) spent most of her life at her father's rectory in Haworth, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. The enigma that such a protected young woman, with almost no social contacts, could write the wildly romantic, complex, and unconventional Wuthering Heights has long fascinated readers. Robert Barnard examines Bronte's insulated childhood and her aversion to relationships. He includes excerpts from the lyrical poems of her twenties, which presage the raw intensity of Wuthering Heights, and investigates the real-life counterparts of the novel's characters, landscape, and buildings. He draws extensively from critical sources varying from early reviews of Wuthering Heights to Gaskell's appraisal of Emily's "stern selfishness", to Juliet Barker's recent biography of the Bronte family.

Please Wait