Emily Brontë

This is a Victorian-era portrait of one of literature's most elusive geniuses, written by a woman who understood the particular alchemy of suffering and imagination. A. Mary F. Robinson constructed her biography at the precise moment when Emily Brontë could finally be seen clearly, freed from the "swings and rebounds of taste" that obscure contemporary judgment. The book traces Emily from her earliest years in the parsonage at Haworth, through the strange, almost feral education the Brontë children gave themselves, to the writing of Wuthering Heights in the midst of family tragedy and decline. Robinson offers a rare window into the fierce, unyielding spirit that drove Emily to reject every conventional path laid before her, and shows how the moors themselves became her truest education.