Last Things: Emily Brontë's Poems Review

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(More customer reviews)For the uninitiated, first let me say that Brontë studies isn't merely an academic specialty. It is a cult. As Miss Austen has her Janeites, so Charlotte, Emily, Anne and sometimes Branwell have their devoted (if less succinctly monikered) following.
The result is that debates linger which otherwise might have died away in under a century and a half. One is attribution. Ever since the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in print, people have argued over who wrote what. "Last Things" inserts a fresh word into this and other ongoing Brontë controversies.
But don't be misled. This book is neither a retracing of tired ground nor a tortured argument driven by the bare hope of saying something new. It is, first and foremost, an examination of Emily Brontë's poems offered in language as incisive as a well-honed blade. Gezari's taut economy of expression occasionally creates enigmas. Chapter five, for instance, makes passing reference to ambiguity in a section of verse that, to my eyes, admits only one interpretation. A very few such moments aside, "Last Things" bears its readers along in close reading that is as vividly alive to the feel of the poetry as to its signification.
Gezari warns at the outset that the poems give little information on the private life of their author, yet the accumulated insights of this book provide a glimpse, like a shadow in a mirror, of someone quite different from the misanthropic self-hurter, the feminine Heathcliff with the rage turned inward, in whose form Emily has been known. At the heart of Brontë's poems, "Last Things" discovers a view of life bound to give us all pause on a human and personal level as well as a literary one.


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At present, Emily Brontë's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Batille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Brontë had a mystical experience because she "reached the very essence of such an experience." 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. For admirers of Wuthering Heights, Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

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