195 years ago

Emily Brontë was born in the village of Thornton on a day like today in 1818, which makes her 195 years old today. After all these years, many questions - probably unanswerable by now - remain regarding both her literary work and her personal life. As is usually the case, this has helped beget a good many and highly diverse theories concerning her: Emily has been an anorexic, she has been in love with a 'Louis Parensell' (a misreading of a poem entitled 'Love's Farewell'), she has been a lesbian, she had an incestous relationship with Branwell, she has been asexual, she has suffered from Peter Pan syndrome, she has been pregnant, she had Asperger, and a long et cetera.

Even her novel and her outstanding poetry have spawned countless essays and theories. And she's rightly called the Sphynx of English Literature for all this.

But we do know that for Emily, her fantasy world of Gondal and the extent to which Wuthering Heights was a part of it, were as real as life itself. Her diary papers show that she hardly noticed the barrier between imagination and reality, famously writing

papa opened the parlour Door and said B gave Branwell a Letter saying here Branwell read this and show it to your Aunt and Charlotte - The Gondals are disc discovering the interior of Gaaldine
Sally mosley is washing in the back kitchin (Emily and Anne's 1834 joint diary paper)

So one thing at least can be said for certain - for Emily Brontë writing was just as necessary as breathing.

To Imagination
When weary with the long day's care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While thou canst speak with such a tone!
So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.
What matters it, that, all around,
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom's bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?
Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature's sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart, how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:
But, thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o'er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death,
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.
I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening's quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!

(Originally Published in 2007)