Poetry | June 02, 2021

Costumery: Cento with Lines from Early Reviews of Wuthering Heights

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë posed as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to publish their work and be taken seriously as authors; rumors swirled around the nature of their identity and their novels’ composition.

The whole firm of Bell & Co.

staring down human life—

 

a depravity strangely their own

one family, one pen—

 

provincialisms, blasphemy, the brutalizing

influence of unchecked passion

 

Scenes so hot, emphatic,

and so sternly masculine in feeling

 

Its sex cannot be mistaken

even in manliest attire

 

A sprawling story casts a gloom

one presiding evil genius

 

two generations of sufferers

the highest effects of the supernatural

 

an atmosphere of mist . . .

A more natural unnatural story

 

we do not remember having read:

But what may be the moral?

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