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CHITHAM, EDWARD. The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte at Work
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). 232 pp. $49.95.
Editing a second edition of her late sister's novel and responding to various early reviewers, Charlotte Bronte claimed that Wuthering Heights had been "hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials." Earlier in the preface she had described her sister's (and, implicitly, her own) creative gift as "something that at times strangely wills and works for itself." Nothing Emily thought or said about her novel and its composition survives, and we are left only with her poetry, a few diary passages and letters, and various school exercises. Therefore, Charlotte's preface and the accompanying "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,'` have spurred extemes of response to Wuthering Heights and have suggested tenuous links of it with other Bronte writings. Charlotte began the preface with a tone of apologetic defense for the book's flaws but concluded with poetic praise of its statuary "form moulded with at least one element of grandeur-power."
Edward Chitham modifies Charlotte's metaphor to view Emily's novel as "the work of a sculptor. not a magician" (p. vii), and even where it lacks hard evidence, The Birth of Wuthering Heights is a work of careful scholarship, incorporating and eclipsing much that has been discovered and postulated about the novel's origins, composition, and relation to Emily's and her sisters' writing. Chitham makes some new connections, reconsiders some old ones, and throughout carefully distinguishes between textual evidence and conjecture. The focus of his attention is on the revisions Emily made in lengthening and softening the book for publication, but his aim is to account for its progress from original idea to submission (with Anne's Agnes Grey) to a publisher in July 1846 and beyond. In the summer of 1846 Wuthering Heights was a...