'The garden-walk with weeds o’ergrown/I love them – how I love them all!'

The London Review of Books has a really interesting review of Emily Brontë: Selected Writings edited by Francis O’Gorman.

Gondal provided Brontë with a great deal of practice in profiling varieties of extreme behaviour. This is a world in which people routinely conduct themselves with Byronic abandon, regardless of gender. But there’s also evidence to suggest that even as she immersed herself ever more deeply in that world she was already imagining alternatives to it. In September 1838, at the age of twenty, she got her first (and only) full-time paid job, as a teacher at Law Hill, a girls’ school at Southowram, near Halifax. It was hard, isolating work, from six in the morning until eleven at night, with a single half-hour break. The speaker of a poem titled ‘4 December 1838’ in the 1850 edition attempts to relieve her ‘harassed heart’ by allowing herself a choice of ‘places’ to visit in her mind. First up is the garden at the Haworth parsonage:

The mute bird sitting on the stone,

The dank moss dripping from the wall,

The garden-walk with weeds o’ergrown

I love them – how I love them all!

These lines prospect methodically, inching forward through parallelism and internal rhyme until they have identified the exact shape and size of the feeling that originally gave rise to them. Scenting bathos in the weeds, perhaps, the speaker then seeks out ‘Another clime, another sky’: one which, while not altogether incompatible with the moors around Haworth, clearly owes the ‘dreamlike charm’ of its wandering deer and rim of blue mountains to Gondal (always as much Scotland as Yorkshire). But something has changed in the method of description. The attention paid to bird, moss and garden-walk coaxes feeling into form. The blue mountains, by contrast, are a token of scenic grandeur cashed in for off-the-shelf solace. One passage is a rehearsal for a novel, the other a resort to fantasy. (David Trotter)

The Collector has an article on Emily Brontë, too.