Last Things

Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This much-needed study reinstates Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. Last Things presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. Last Things also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.