Book description
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 authors's work, and of the way in
which the poems of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect
each other.
