Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

Emily Jane Brontë (1818 {u2013} 1848) is best known for the only novel she wrote, Wuthering Heights (1847). Since the year of its publication, the novel never ceased to attract both readers' and critics' attention; the thing that drove them to wonder about and try to investigate its author's life and intellectual tendencies through interpreting the novel itself. However, the point that most of the novel's readers and critics missed was that before writing this novel, Emily Brontë started writing verse since she was a child nearly until she died in 1848, only one year after the novel's publication. The insufficient critiques of Brontë's poetry led to her being credited as a novelist and overlooked as a poet. Due to this observation, the present study is an attempt at interpreting Brontë's poetry afresh, and analyzing it so as to examine its writer's intellectual and aesthetic position in relation to the transitional period she was living in, namely, the early 19th century. In other words, the present study will attempt a reading of Brontë's verse to figure out whether she conformed to or/and diverged from the dominant sensibility of her age, thus interpreting her poetry in a manner that will persuade her readers to acknowledge the Haworth woman, not only as a novelist, but as a poet as well

Issued also as CD