Emily Bronte and the Religious Imagination

Simon Marsden

"Through close readings from her literary writings - from Wuthering Heights to her poems, essays and diaries - this book explores Emily Bronte's theological beliefs"-- "Readers of Emily Brontë's poetry and of Wuthering Heights have seen in their author, variously, a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic, or a visionary "mystic of the moors". Rather than seeking to resolve this matter, Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination suggests that such conflicting readings are the product of tensions, conflicts and ambiguities within the texts themselves. Rejecting the idea that a single, coherent set of religious doctrines are to be found in Brontë's work, this book argues that Wuthering Heights and the poems dramatise individual experiences of faith in the context of a world in which such faith is always conflicted, always threatened. Brontë's work dramatises the experience...