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The Brontë sisters are three of my all-time, all-star favourite authors. I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre when I was at school and was instantly bewitched by them, and have re-read them both often in the years since. Every time I read the Brontë sisters’ novels (not just those two) I find more in them to love. By the time you read this post, I will be in the midst of two long weeks off on holiday, and during that time I’m going to make my very first trip up to Howarth to see the parsonage where the girls lived with their brother and father - I can’t wait - talk about kid in a sweet shop! So, in celebration of this fact, today I bring you an excerpt from Janet Gezari’s 2007 book Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems.

[Elizabeth] Gaskell’s well-known image of the three sisters pacing up and down in the sitting room of the Parsonage while talking over their stories, reminds us that poems were not among the creative achievements shared during those evening sessions. When Charlotte, who knew that her sister wrote poems, came upon her Gondal Poems notebook in the autumn of 1845 and read some, Emily felt violated. Once persuaded to participate in Charlotte’s publication project, she readied only twenty-one of her poems for printing. In the 1846 volume, her poems usually alternate with those of her sisters, so that relations between her poems are subordinated to relations between them and the contiguous poems of Charlotte and Anne. All of the poems Brontë selected for publication in 1846 came from the two books into which she had begun transcribing some of her poems about a year earlier, the Gondal Poems notebook and the so-called Honresfeld manuscript. After transcribing her poems, she almost always discarded earlier drafts. Her single-leaf manuscripts preserve many apparently unfinished or incomplete poems, usually described as fragments, and we cannot know what she intended to do with them. The posthumous publication of seventeen more poems in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey nearly doubled the number of Emily Brontë’s poems available to nineteenth-century readers. What knowledge we have about Charlotte Brontë’s aggressive editing of these poems relies on a comparison of the manuscript versions in Emily Brontë’s hand to the published versions and not on Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence with her publisher about the edition, which says nothing about her editorial judgements. 1850 added one poem to the canon for which no holograph manuscript survives, ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning.’ For generations of Brontë readers, as for T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, this poem has sounded ‘the keynote to her character’, yet its authorship continues to be disputed. In my last chapter, I argue that Charlotte, not Emily, is the author of ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning,’ and that the poem promotes Charlotte’s view of Emily, not Emily’s view of herself or her own poetic project.

My title registers my starting place. A concern with endings, and with how we defy, resist, blur, or transcend them, characterizes Brontë’s life, her art, and this book. In Carson’s words, ‘She whached the bars of time, which broke.’ Brontë’s approach to an end is most evident when death or memory is the subject of a poem, as it so frequently is. But there is no poet for whom immortality resolves less, or for whom ordinary temporal elements—night, day, evening, fall and spring—are more miscible. She gives us a vision of life sub specie iterationis. Her poems’ formal resistance to endings can be seen in the recurrence of the word again both at the end of lines and at the end of poems, where it appears more often than any other word, disrupting our feeling that the experience the poem has recorded is over and done. Or in her fondness for circular structures and for outcomes that resemble openings rather than endings. If time is a prison that confines us, then Brontë’s poems return again and again both to the prison site and to the prison break. Although I do not discuss all her poems, the view of Emily Brontë’s poems presented here seeks to be comprehensive. It relates to individual poems, to the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, to her poetical fragments and her writing practice, to her motives for writing poetry, and to the connections between her poems and her famous novel. When Brontë’s ordinary life enters into my account of her poems, it does so to illuminate them, and not vice versa. I do not ignore the presence of Gondal in the poems, but I resist dividing poems that belong to a Gondal narrative from poems that probably do not, either because Brontë transcribed them into her Honresfeld manuscript instead of her Gondal Poems notebook or because they include no references to Gondal characters or places. A specious distinction between ‘Gondal’ and ‘personal’ narrative contexts continues to thrive, especially when biographical interpretations are at stake. Believing that a Gondal poem is less personal than a non-Gondal poem is like believing that The Bell Jar is less personal than ‘Daddy’. Although she separated Gondal poems from non-Gondal poems by transcribing them into separate notebooks, Brontë composed both kinds of poems intermittently for as long as she wrote poems. For me, a Gondal poem is one in which a lyrical impulse converges with an occasion provided by a narrative about invented characters with aristocratic names. One way to look at Gondal is as intentional dreaming, a release like the one we experience in a dream when the self is freed to act various roles, but always under the aegis of an informing self-idiom that organizes and unifies whatever experience is being represented. The chapters that follow endeavour to describe both the range and the distinctiveness of the experience Emily Brontë’s poems offer.

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By Anatoly Liberman

On seeing the second line of the title, some experts in Shakespeare’s diction may have jumped to the conclusion that they are in for another essay on a scurrilous topic. Not quite, unless the subject English spelling is considered obscene by definition. How is it possible for a single vowel letter to have so many values? “Elementary, my dear Watkins,” as Sherlock Holmes did not say in any tale told by Conan Doyle. (Supposedly, the phrase was first used in 1915 by P.G. Wodenhouse in his novel Psmith Journalist. In Conan Doyle, the exchange between Watson and Holmes runs as follows: “’Excellent!’” I cried. “’Elementary’,” said he”. Those famous familiar quotations that everybody knows! They are like the proverbs of Alfred and the sayings of King Solomon. Dozens of works on word history open with Voltaire’s witticism that in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little. Yet it does not turn up in any of his written works.)

Unless counterbalanced by drastic reforms, long tradition usually makes spelling appear at best antiquated and at worst irrational. “This happens in all languages. For example, let us take English,” to quote a linguist of my acquaintance. We will follow his advice and “take” the letter o. Consider the following list:
bosom, Boleyn, woman;
love, dove, above, come, done;
move, prove;
on, gone;
one, none;
so, toe, nose.
On and nose (the short and the long of it) are taken for granted (so and toe are, in partly like nose), but the others?

I’ll begin with woman. The Old English for woman was wifman. Its long i designated a sound comparable with Modern Engl. ee in wee. Later that vowel underwent shortening, so that the word’s pronunciation began to resemble Modern Engl. wifman, rather than weefman, whereupon f was assimilated to its neighbor and wifman first turned into wimman (with regard to assimilation, compare lem’me go from let me go and leman “lover” from leofman) and then into wiman, for, as time went on, English lost long consonants. Contrary to professors of elocution, “common people” mispronounce words, slur as much as they can, and in general do not care about their delivery. Otherwise they would not have allowed wifman to degenerate into wimman. But they did not stop there. To articulate w, speakers protrude their lips and are not always in a hurry to spread them again. The result of this laziness was that Old Engl. widu “wood,” for instance, yielded wudu. Likewise, wiman became wuman. In the Middle English period, scribes disliked the sequences wu, um, mu, un, nu, and uv (because of too many vertical strokes the letters were hard to separate in reading, the more so as the usual signs for v and w were u and uu respectively) and substituted o for u. This is how uuuman became uuoman, that is, woman. Present day English has no words spelled with initial wu-. The few exceptions are dialectal forms recorded by linguists centuries after the phonetic processes mentioned here had been completed, and the only one most of us know is wuther, thanks to Emily Bronte’s title Wuthering Heights. In the early modern period, short u, except in the north of England, changed to the vowel of Standard English one now hears in shut up. Hence love, dove, above, come, and others. The story of done is more complicated: the change from long o (as in the modern paw or pore) to long u (as in the modern school), the shortening of that u, and the last step to the vocalic value of u in shut up. Womb and woman, which also have o contiguous to w, are still pronounced with the vowel of wuther. The original sound remained intact under the influence of w-.

The lips are active not only in the production of w but also in the production of p and b, and this is why pull and bull are pronounced the way they are. However, sometimes p- and b- could not save the following vowel from change, and alongside put, pull, and bull we have putty, pulp, and bulb. Unfortunately, the pernicious habit of designating the vowel in words like womb with the letter o resulted in the modern spelling bosom. The long stressed vowel of Old Engl. bosom (again as in Modern Engl. paw, pore) changed to long u (the equivalent of Modern Engl. oo), underwent shortening, and has been preserved. Boozom, boozam, or buzom would have made sense. Bosom reminds us of the word’s image that has not existed for at least half a millennium, and this is its only virtue. Anne Boleyn’s name was also spelled Bullen, but the unnatural variant has triumphed. When a word of Modern English is spelled with oo, we may assume that in the past it had a long vowel, regardless of whether its today’s reflex is long (as in food, mood) or short (as in good, hood). But the vowel of wood hardly ever was long. It is often said that conservative English spelling comes students in good stead, for it provides a window to the history of the language. It does, but those who look out of that window should be warned that the glass distorts the picture more than once.

It is now clear why prove and proof are spelled differently. The digraph oo in proof causes no surprise. Prove joined the words with v after o. The difference between prove, move and love, dove is that in the first group the vowel has remained long. Had love and dove withstood shortening, the four words would have rhymed, as they probably did in Shakespeare’s days. Today love/move is a so-called rhyme to the eye—a fact of no importance, since rhyming poetry is all but dead.

Old Engl. an “one” (with long a, as in Modern Engl. father) should have developed like stan, which is now stone, and it did, judging by the pronunciation of only (from anlic) and alone (a fusion of two words). In Middle English, an became on (on as in today’s awning). The rest is less clear. At that time, long vowels and diphthongs behaved similarly in that they could be pronounced with stress on the beginning and on the end, and this is why leosan, for instance, existed in two variants: leosan and leosan. As a consequence of this alternation, Standard Engl. lose, the reflex of leosan, has a dialectal variant lease, which continues leosan. This is also the reason show has a competing spelling shew (among the greats G.B. Shaw used only shew). If choose had sheared the fate of lose, today we would be asked “to cheese/chease our cheese.” Apparently, Middle Engl. on, that is, oon could be oon or oon, depending on the rhythm of the sentence. The variant oon was pronounced uon and won, rhyming with on. Several other dialectal variants of the same type have also been attested. Won became wun and later won, indistinguishable from the past tense of win. The pronunciation wonly was already known in 1570. As is usual with phonetic novelties, educated people first rejected the “vulgar” pronunciation of one with initial w- but were overwhelmed. The result is that today one is not a homophone of own. Most language historians trace the novelty described here (from oon to wun and won) to the British southwest, but it is hard to understand why the local pronunciation of such an important word should have been adopted by the Standard. Perhaps the forms with w- developed in the London area in the “allegro speech” of the capital (a great melting pot at all times) or under the influence of the “lower classes.” Once and none have aligned themselves with one. Spelling passed this tempest by.

The conclusion is obvious: the letter o has so many values because spelling has not caught up with the history of English sounds. Language retaliates sluggishness by producing spelling pronunciations. The fairly recent innovations often and fore-head are not the only examples of this type. Those who know about Coventry only from books sometimes pronounce Cov- as in cover. And indeed, who won’t be lost among Coventry ~ cover ~ over? Other people think that the name of the poet Donne, a homophone of done and dun, should be pronounced with the vowel of on. We can pity the naïve foreigner who missed the difference between worsted, the past tense of the verb worst, and worsted, the fabric, but sad is the lot of a native speaker who so often feels like a foreigner at home.

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