Review: Sarah Ruden on Emily Brontë

The Brontë sisters—none more than Emily—were racked between unbearable contradictions. Their father came from a crowded hovel in Ireland but achieved middle-class respectability as a Church of England clergyman, with a confected surname suggesting the Greek word for thunder and sporting one or another pretentious diacritical mark. Yet he raised his family in a dark pit of the mid-stage industrial revolution, the West Riding of Yorkshire, where many people they knew slaved in the mines and mills from childhood, and average life expectancy was nineteen. But the towns shared the landscape with scenic moors full of wildlife, and with farming settlements rich in old dialect and folklore.