Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Brontë family
Charlotte Brontë said of her sister: "Though her feeling for the people
round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor,
with very few exceptions, ever experienced ... she could hear of them
with interest and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and
accurate; but _with_ them she rarely exchanged a word." And yet you
might have said she had been listening to Joseph all her life, such is
her command of his copious utterance: "'Ech! ech!' exclaimed Joseph.
'Weel done, Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! Howsiver, t' maister sall
just tum'le o'er them brocken pots; un' then we's hear summut; we's hear
how it's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve pining fro' this to
Churstmas, flinging t' precious gifts o' God under fooit i' yer flaysome
rages! But I'm mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will Hathecliff
bide sich bonny ways, think ye? I nobbut wish he may catch ye i' that
plisky. I nobbut wish he may.'"
Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; but it was well-nigh
impossible to make him more alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff. If
Emily's hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again in Isabella.
These two are the types of the civilized, the over-refined, the delicate
wearers of silk and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure white
ceilings bordered with gold, "with showers of glass-drops hanging in
silver chains from the centre". They, as surely as the tainted Hindley,
are bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, primeval flesh
and blood. The fatal moment in the tale is where the two half-savage
children, Catherine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange.
Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is doomed to go down
before Wuthering Heights. But Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherine
too. She has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the glittering
glass-drops and the illusion of Thrushcross Grange. She has divorced her
body from her soul for a little finer living, for a polished, a
scrupulously clean, perfectly presentable husband.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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