Emily Brontë - The Complete Poems

I am grateful to the following libraries that have made manuscripts in their collections available to me, and to the librarians of these collections for their hospitality: the Bronte Parsonage Museum Library, the British Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, the Princeton University Libraries, and the University of Texas at Austin Library.

I wish to thank the staff of the Charles E. Shain Library of Connecticut College, particularly Head Reference Librarian Jim MacDonald, for their assistance. I am also indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Travel-to-Collections grant and a summer stipend, and to Connecticut College for financial support, including an augmented sabbatical grant. Charles Hartman was generous in providing technical support and encouragement. I am above all grateful to Christopher Ricks, the General Editor of this series, for seeing the need for a new edition of Emily Jane Bronts poems and for patient, detailed criticism. While working on this edition, I have kept in mind Robert Bridgess review of Clement Shorters 1910 edition of Bronts poems: That anyone should have kept Emily Bronts poems in his desk for years, and should then apologize for publishing them, and not take the trouble to print them correctly, is a piece of magnificent insouciance.

I trust that readers will not attribute errors in this edition to the editors insouciance, and I will be grateful to those who point them out to me.

Emily Jane Bronte the name she preferred on the title page of her Gondal Poems notebook published only twenty-one poems during her lifetime in a book undertaken jointly with her sisters, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846). The book, which also included nineteen poems by Charlotte Bronte and twenty-one poems by Anne Bront, was published at the authors own expense. It was encouragingly reviewed, but only two copies had been sold a year after the publication date. Emily Bronte selected her twenty-one poems for publication from two notebooks into which she had begun transcribing poems in 1844, choosing fifteen from the notebook now known as the Honresfeld manuscript and six from the notebook titled Gondal Poems. The Honresfeld manuscript, last located in the collection of Sir Alfred Law (at Honresfeld in Lancashire), is now missing, but a reproduction in facsimile was published in the Shakespeare Head edition of the poems of Emily Jane and Anne Bronte in 1934.

It has twenty-nine pages and contains thirty-one poems. None makes any reference to Gondal, the mythic country Emily and Anne Bronte invented as young adolescents and about which Emily continued to write for the rest of her life. The descendants of George Smith, Charlotte Bronts publisher, presented the Gondal Poems notebook to the British Museum in 1933. It has sixty-eight pages and contains forty-four poems. In preparing her Gondal poems for publication in 1846, Emily Bronte consistently removed any references to Gondal places and characters from them. The history of Emily Bronts poems since 1846 has been complicated, first by Charlotte Bronts editing of seventeen poems to accompany a new edition of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in 1850, then by the publication of poems incorrectly attributed to Emily Bronte or correctly attributed to her but inaccurately transcribed.

Holograph manuscripts indicate that Charlotte Bronte substantially revised as well as retitled most of the poems she printed in 1850; no manuscript of one poem, Often rebuked, yet always back returning, survives, and its authorship has been disputed. Sixty-seven poems were printed in a limited edition in 1902, but Clement Shorter attempted the first complete edition of the poems in 1910 (