She left behind very little documentation of her life: there’s a novel, Wuthering Heights, that is considered to be one of the greatest in the English canon, some astonishingly brilliant poetry, and almost nothing else. In part, that’s because Emily’s whole thing is to be elusive, to make you not know quite what to do with her. But Emily Brontë - with her child ghosts sobbing at the window and her brutal, violent men Emily Brontë, whose 200th birthday is Monday - I have never quite known what to do with her. Of the canonical three, personally, I will go to bat for both Austen and for Charlotte Brontë - witty women and sad men having charged conversations in the drawing room, sign me up. The cliché about bookish women and the novels of the 19th century is that you have to pick from three authors, and you’re only allowed to love one of them: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Emily Brontë - you have to have one favorite, and whichever one it is says something profound about you.
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