The Brontë sisters. A timeline of wuthering discoveries

At 14, I became a huge fan of Jane Eyre.

At 18, I went crazy for Wuthering Heights.

At 20, I discovered that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights had not been written by the same person but by two different female authors that happened to be sisters.

I had to reach my 30s to find out that there was a third Brontë sister, Anne, and that she was an author too.

Timelines are interesting because they often reveal much more than a series of actions arranged in time. They can show the development of the relationship between those actions and their context, as well as the historical, cultural or personal barriers that determined one order rather than another.

My Brontë’s anthology timeline says a lot about the historical and cultural period in which I was a teenager and a young woman in Italy; about the accessibility and type of presentation of female novels; about how my attention as a student was trained in the direction of the so called “good literature”; and about how the growth of my awareness was accompanied by a change in my judgment about books. But my timeline also tells how stories for women written by women still remain among women, influencing their perspectives, shaping their desires and awakening their consciences.

Discovering Jane Eyre [Charlotte Brontë, 1847]

I watched Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996) on TV one summer evening during a heavy thunderstorm, licking my lemon popsicle with my aunt Susanna spoiling all the lines that she knew by heart. It was she who told me the film was based on a centuries old book.

I don't know if it was the magic of the sounds of the storm that matched with the ghostly settings of the film, the fact that I was with my anarchic childless aunt who let me eat as many popsicles as I wanted, or that for the first time I saw her truly passionate about something, but watching that film that night left a deep mark on me. At 14, the films that impressed me were mostly epic in nature, with dazzling fantasy settings and beautiful protagonists, nuggets of universal wisdom delivered between battles and colossal finales. Zeffirelli's film was instead quite realistic, very bitter, dark and at times boring, with ordinary people as main characters and a not exactly glorious ending. But somehow the story of Jane Eyre touched many of my inner strings and I absolutely felt the urgency to find out more. So much so that the next day I cycled to my village library in search of a copy of the novel. 

I found a dated edition in the coming-of-age literature section for girls, alongside Pippi Longstocking and other books with shocking pink covers featuring little hearts and couples holding hands. The edition bore the dotted name “C. Brontë”, and I didn't question the author's gender: I took it for granted that the book, being a secular old text, was written by a man. It was only by talking to the librarian, who used to make paternalistic comments on every book I chose, that I discovered the writer was a woman. What a pleasant breakthrough!

The inner strings the film had struck resonated even more strongly as I read the book. The reasons why the story had piqued my interest right away were clear: despite the setting in a bygone era, the novel presents a protagonist who has many contemporary (and inspiring) characteristics. Jane is a girl who has to fend for herself, finding her place in the world, keeping her job to be autonomous and accepting the realities she could not change. She is also a strong, honest, and intelligent character, capable of speaking up for herself, of acting consistently with her thoughts, even when they entail serious consequences, and looking for her own happiness. Even though she is not pretty, she knows how to value herself. Not the kind of damsel in distress so typical of the XIX century novels!

Jane's proud nature emerges clearly from the first pages of the book, when she is still a child and recounts the episode of an adult questioning her:

“‘No sight so sad as that of a naughty child’, he began, ‘especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?’

‘They go to hell’, was my ready and orthodox answer.

‘And what is hell? Can you tell me that?’

‘A pit full of fire’.

‘And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?’

‘No, sir’.

‘What must you do to avoid it?’

I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: ‘I must keep in good health and not die’” (Brontë, 2014: 46).

This side of her character was something I felt very close to every time I responded to an unjust teacher, to the bossy priest of my village, or to my own parents, who very often were light years away from my perspective. The pleasure of challenging limits and of not recognizing authority, and the inability to remain silent in the face of injustice despite the consequences were traits Jane and I had in common. But there was something more.

By that time, I had already endured many of the misogynistic clichés in vogue both in the micro world of my birthplace (the isolated, very patriarchal, agricultural hinterland of North Eastern Italy) and in the macro one of my national context (the mainstream culture dominated by Silvio Berlusconi's television and press). I grew up in a polarized reality where it was absolutely normal for women to be hyper-visible as sexual objects and almost invisible as political subjects (or just as human beings). Not that I realized it: I didn't know a world that was different. So, what I saw around me wasn't a landscape of social ugliness, but just the reality with its accepted behaviours. For this reason comments like "e fèmene e à un thervel che gnanca i porthei i ò magna" (females have brains that even pigs refuse to eat) or justifications like "If there are no female geniuses, there's a reason”, they didn't make me indignant. I considered them normal ways of speaking and, to some extent, common sense.

Yet something inside me began to itch when I hit puberty, and it wasn't pimples or the first hairs under my armpits. It was a kind of vague, subcutaneous anger. It grew over the years, silent and inevitable, like the turmoil of hormones and the swelling of certain parts of my body. And every time a male peer told me “Shut up!” or “Stupid!” or “Females don’t know anything”, that anger pierced my brain like a crown of pins. Sometimes I couldn't hold it in and I exploded, screaming or swearing, while my shocked classmates watched at me wondering "What's wrong with you?". There was no reason to be angry, they didn't see any problem. And actually I couldn't see it either: I didn't know why I was angry or what I was angry at. In a world that normalizes discrimination, discrimination is normalized in return and it is therefore invisible, even to those who suffer from it. There are no effective words to call it, making it visible to everyone else. Writer and professor Savala Nolan, in her reckoning, chooses to call womanhood "the thing" precisely because: “There is no language for it. There is no word that sums up its scale. There is no one word for what you must endure” (2026: 3). But I would understand that much later.

In this regard, anyway, Jane Eyre gave me a tremendous gift. It gave my anger form and words. It made me recognize it for what it was: the suffering of being female. 

Moving from childhood to adolescence meant moving from a body that I perceived as gender neutral to one that carried with it the sexualization of my person. Having breasts was for me like carrying the stigma of being different, drawing a line under my feet every time I did or said something. Not that being female wasn't thrown in my face even before puberty (I grew up being told I had to "behave like a lady and be good," and my entire education was gendered accordingly), but it wasn't until puberty that my body (my breasts, my legs, my butt, even my face or the way I licked an ice cream) became definitively objectified and my person identified with my body. So yes, I felt terribly angry about that.

In Jane Eyre the common thread of the story is indeed the difficulty of being a woman. More specifically: the difficulty of being proud of being a woman, together with the struggle to be recognized, despite being a woman, for one's own humanity.

It was the first time that I found in an old book a heroine who asserts her intellectual dignity against that of men. To the grumpy Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre says:

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart!” (Brontë, 2014: 385).

Furthermore, Jane recognizes a gender hierarchy that is not dictated by nature but by different possibilities:

“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience” (2014: 204).

She shows how women's needs are the same as men's: 

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex” (2014: 167).

And she marks her willpower and her freedom not only to choose whom she loves, but also to leave who doesn’t deserve her love. Again, in response to Mr. Rochester who was trying to restrain her, calling her a “wild frantic bird”, Jane replies:  “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you” (2014: 386).

There was a lot to learn from Jane Eyre for a 14-year-old Italian girl in the 2000s who had no idea what feminism or gender issues were, and who had no alternative female role models to look up to other than the supermodels on Berlusconi's TV or the all-home-and-church women in her family. And although Mr. Rochester wasn't a character I particularly liked - and I would have preferred him to remain blind and alone, buried by regrets and the ruins of his castle - Jane's words remained a beacon in the night for me for several years. At least until I encountered Wuthering Heights, which would shatter everything I'd ever read before.

Discovering Wuthering Heights [Emily Brontë, 1847]

I arrived at Wuthering Heights by another route, years later.

I discovered that this was the only book my great-grandmother - the only non illiterate grannie in my family - had ever read in her life, and that she had continued to praise it for 80 years, so much so that her children and grandchildren were familiar with the title without knowing an awful lot about the plot or the author.

I found a copy for sale for €2 in a supermarket and I bought it. It was sponsored and sold alongside low-budget “women's literature”, mostly romance novels with half-dressed models on idyllic beaches on the covers, and I remember the clerk raising a sneering eyebrow as he handed the item to the register. Even in that edition, the author's name was dotted: E. Brontë. I didn't notice the different initial letter and I just connected the surname to Jane Eyre’s writer, easily convinced that it must have been the same author.

It was a difficult and shocking read, completely different from what I expected and from what I was used to reading. It wasn't the usual sappy-trash romantic story. Actually, from my point of view, it wasn’t a love story at all. Quoting Emma Flint, “it is the story of violation […]. It’s about unhealed trauma that poisons everyone it touches” (2026). It is a story about violence, racism, class injustice, power and revenge. Heathcliff, one of the two protagonists, is not a wealthy, white English landowner but a penniless, dark-skinned orphan, who is humiliated and oppressed because of his origins and as such he cannot have whom he desires, damning to death everyone around him for that. Talking about her lover, he will say at the end of the book: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” (Brontë, 2003: 324). But Wuthering Heights is also the story of how impetuous and nonconformist characters can transform the purity of their emotional impulses into toxicity, if they are immersed in an oppressive, unequal and hypocritical society. As Samantha Ellis suggests about the main characters: “Cathy and Heathcliff are not sensible in their love. But the novel holds out the hope that their love could have survived if the world weren’t so petty and stupid” (2015: 192). Indeed, to the blaming housekeeper Nelly, the other protagonist Catherine replies:

“You think me a selfish wretch, but, did it never strike you that, if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? Whereas, if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother’s power. […] My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning […]. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it” (Brontë, 2003: 82).

I have often wondered how such a dark and twisted plot could have been so deeply felt by a moral and god-fearing woman like my great-grandmother, and I come to the conclusion that perhaps I didn't know her as well as I thought. There were many more questions about her that would remain unanswered: why was it the first and last book she'd ever read? Had she chosen it? Had it been given to her? And why was she - a peasant woman - the only one in the entire family capable of tackling and understanding a complex text? Over the years, I would see many other women, very different in age and background, discover this novel and love it, raising and leaving many similar questions hanging. And I realized it was part of the mystery and the power of that book.

For my part, I can say it was a transformative read. 

It was new for me to find two protagonists who actually were diehard anti-heroes, and I remember very well how I perceived their “negative” nature as part of their being true to themselves. What teenager doesn't end up feeling wrong in trying to be themselves? Or doesn't feel the need to go against society's judgments in order to find themselves? It seemed to me that no matter how much viciousness and violence Catherine and Heathcliff were capable of, it was still less annoying than the hypocrisy of all the characters around them, whose actions fell within the shared morality.

I remember enjoying the cynicism that permeates the story: the inner sense of pride in one's own wildness; the lack of redemption and happy ending; the presence of concrete limitations - as unjust as insurmountable - like skin colour, money, social appearances. I felt all these elements resonating strongly within me because, at the time, I was a disillusioned teenager, wounded by social injustice, and fragmented by my own internal conflicts between my gender and my uniqueness as a person.

At 18, my anger at being female hadn't disappeared, but its contours had blurred into a broader horizon, where hundreds of other systemic inequalities had appeared. At 18, I had already begun that process of "whataboutism" that leads to minimising a problem when confronted with issues perceived as more serious. My difficult relationship with my being a woman was no longer part of a gender-encompassing condition, but I considered it just a personal problem to manage. I felt it was a matter of finding a balance between what others expected of me and what I wanted to be. That’s all. Just like the protagonist Cathy, whose behaviour didn't fit the expectations of her society, I perceived myself at a crossroads where one of the two paths to take was compromise.

Wuthering Heights presents this same compromise as one of the many that the world imposes on people, both women and men. I found it very fair. Especially that the book destroyed them all, men and women, with the same fairness. Rediscovering in a book many of the problems I sensed, and finding, as their solution, the destruction not only of the problems but also of the reality they belong to, was a bit like saying: “if there's no remedy, then screw everyone”. Extremely liberating. It gave me the bittersweet taste of revenge.

I identified my psychological landscape with the storms of the Yorkshire moors and their harsh, dark profile, finding in the anger of Brontë's characters an almost cathartic relief for my own. I really couldn’t help but fall madly in love with the disturbing power of Wuthering Heights’s writing. It made me feel incredibly free.

Discovering Wuthering Heights as an almost male literature 

Even though Wuthering Heights was a life-changing read for me when I was 18, along with The Brothers Karamazov and In Search of Lost Time, I couldn’t share my enthusiasm for this novel with other people as I easily could with these other books. Indeed, I couldn't have done it without falling into the stereotype of the “girl who reads books for girls”. That is the stereotype of the frivolous young woman, who makes love stories her main interest, who doesn't have the depth nor the taste to look at issues that truly have value, like politics, science, philosophy, history... or good literature. At that time, in the Italian mainstream cultural landscape, Wuthering Heights was considered a female romance and was sold at a special discount in the same box as beach novels. It wasn't on the shelf (sacred altar) of classic literature, alongside Dostoevskij and Proust. Even my literature-loving friends who knew of  the existence of Wuthering Heights dismissed it as "romantic stuff for women," without ever opening it. I knew that, and I pretended I wasn't interested either.

If the power of Wuthering Heights had quickly made me forget Jane Eyre, the violence of the prejudice against women's literature and the fear of being misjudged made me first hide and then disown Wuthering Heights as well, as I would have done with many other things over the years. This is how I began my twenties and my humanistic studies: internalizing that nothing good could have come from the minds (and pens) of women.

It was during this phase of my life, of rewriting my identity and of simultaneously denying my womanhood, that I obsessively studied many of the texts considered the "masterpieces of thought". Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Descartes, Hobbes, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Freud, among my favourites. Almost all of them were as brilliant as convinced that women were either a tumor or a necessary evil. And it was by following this long, harsh, turgid thread of Western male thought that I arrived at the philosopher Georges Bataille's 1957 essay Literature and Evil (2012), miraculously finding within it, among his eight cruelest authors in literature, a woman: Emily Brontë.

Even though I used to consider the presence of just one woman among many other male geniuses what is commonly called the exception-that-proves-the-rule, finding her, the author of the novels that marked my adolescence (I still believed she also wrote Jane Eyre), it made me incredibly happy. It was proof that I hadn't been wrong, that the power of Wuthering Heights' writing hadn't shaken my spirit and imagination because I was just a young girl, that is, a creature lacking the depth or the taste to look at issues that truly have value. The mere presence of Emily Brontë alongside Proust, Baudelaire, Kafka, Blake, Sade, Michelet, and Genet was the validation from male Western critics that could finally allow me to talk about that novel without being ashamed. Who would have told me that George Bataille, this great philosophical and literary man, was just a reader of books for girls or a person without depth or taste? No one. Placing the author of Wuthering Heights in the top 8 of the masters of literary cruelty, George Bataille had therefore removed her book from the female horizon (the box of discounted beach read), returning it to the male one (the great classics shelf).

At the time, finding Brontë’s name validated by such a renowned male intellectual was enough for me. But it must be said that, re-reading the essay nowadays, I couldn't help but notice that his recognition of Emily Brontë seems to be granted almost reluctantly, sometimes grudgingly, and with many stereotyped preconditions.

The French philosopher writes: “Emily Brontë, of all women, seems to have been the object of a privileged curse. Her short life was only moderately unhappy. Yet, keeping her moral purity intact, she had a profound experience of the abyss of Evil”.

Bataille is here insinuating that what seems to be a typically male curse – something that grants its bearer a third eye, revealing the transformative forces of Evil - has exceptionally struck a woman. The philosopher is implying that this foresight did not lead Brontë to be a dandy artist, nor was her foresight the fruit of a dissolute life either (her “moral purity” remained indeed “intact”). The privilege of this dark side did not place her into the male universe of sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll like many of the other seven companions in the same essay. Brontë - good girl - remained within the confines of feminine virtues, she remained in her place. Although Bataille stresses this point because he does not understand how she could have experienced the “abyss” without having had a tragic life (“her short life was only moderately unhappy”)  nor a dissolute one (directly facing the Evil outside the shared morality), it seems that he does not fully prise the very talent he is putting inside the pantheon of the great eight. Indeed, instead of recognizing Brontë’s genius in an act of faith, or simply accepting it as he does with the other authors he cites, he attributes her “privileged curse” to something that she herself was neither aware nor master of. Speaking of death as the true fuel of love, he says: “To no mortal love does this apply as much as to the union between the heroes of Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Nobody revealed this truth more forcefully than Emily Brontë. It is not that she envisaged it in the explicit and cumbersome terms in which I have interpreted it: she felt it and expressed it mortally, almost divinely”.

As the writer Ansgar Allen highlights, referring to Bataille’s view on Emily's Evil’s writings: “[He] pays attention here to the suggestion that this is done by way of a kind of mystical experience” (2024: 134). So Emily Brontë, in Literature and Evil, seems to be presented more as a mystic - a creature possessed by a vision that does not belong to her and of which she is a mere intermediary - rather than as an original mind.

Not a great compliment, actually.

Indeed, using the term of mystic to define women who managed to make their voices heard and pass on nonconformist thoughts in time of huge gender oppression, it could be read just as another way to shift the attention from the power of their ideas to their private and hyper-scrutable experiences (Jantzen, 2020). Under this point of view, if Bataille is suggesting that Emily Brontë was a mystic rather than an outstanding creative artist, it means he is placing her work outside the traditional framework of intellectual authority. Seeing her as an unconscious witness of this obscure landscape and not as its aware master, it is a bit like saying: “Thank you Emily for reporting this testimony and for having expressed it mortally, almost divinely, but now let those who have the appropriate intellectual tools envisage it in the explicit and cumbersome terms”. Once again in the patriarchal tradition, he is undermining her credibility and achievements just as he is seemingly granting them. 

Funnily enough, when I first read Bataille's essay, I noticed none of this. Instead, having found the French philosopher's way of analysing perfectly aligned with the philosophical and literary views I had been educated with, his words about Emily seemed to me unequivocal compliments. They also had an enlightening effect on my literary judgment, clearing many of my doubts not only about Brontë’s work but also about a broader value of writing. Indeed, it is in Literature and Evil that I realized that Emily's writing was considered good because it wasn't addressing the usual female topics: she was exploring the abyss, the quintessential men's playing field since women are locked in the kindergarten of “moral purity”. And it wasn't the usual female topics because Emily herself was an inexplicable exception to her gender: she had the “privilege curse”, the second most common male disease after prostate problems, that showed her what she had not experienced and what she could not fully understand. Elementary, my dear Watson! For this reason, she had been given a place at the VIP table where the men eat. But since she was still a woman, it was like she had to serve all their dishes first. At least it is what I felt, that in Bataille’s essay Emily Brontë was just the female quota at the banquet of the gods.

Discovering Emily, Charlotte and what is not love

Leaving aside internalizations of inferiority and epistemological discrimination, and who should or should not wash the dishes, this new light shed on Emily Brontë’s work allowed me to discover – finally - that Jane Eyre was not written by her, but by her sister Charlotte.

This new revelation ushered in a period of comparisons between the two novels and, consequently, speculation about the two sisters. Whose writing was the better one? How was it possible that two sisters had such divergent visions and sensibilities? Which of the two novels survived the times better? Which of the two would I take to a desert island as my only book? I'm kidding, I've never asked myself that last question. But my fascination with the Brontë sisters' worldviews did plant its seed in me, growing many other questions.

One of these concerned the different meanings given to love. Because it is difficult to examine the worldviews that underpin the plots of the two novels without considering the romantic relationships that run through them.

While I never particularly liked Mr. Rochester, my fondness for Jane Eyre made me accept their love story. Theirs, however, remained an unbalanced and contentious relationship: that of an older, moody and complaining boss with a much younger, proud and powerless employee. A relationship constantly renegotiated within the hierarchical disproportion between the two genders and the excluding antagonism of two different social classes, always at the mercy of his violent mood swings and her moral laws. Jane wants to be considered an equal by her partner and that was a great thing at her time, but it is also the only thing she seems to seek and to need in the relationship.

When I read the book I remember finding the story completely normal.

I found it normal that Rochester bitterly mocked Jane; that Jane lacked the slightest empathy for Mrs. Rochester (the mad wife locked in the attic); and that she alternately assumed the roles of nurse and saviour, returning to Rochester to heal him physically, after she had "redeemed" him spiritually. Actually, this was what I had been taught in my family too: that women have the task of "putting men back on the right path"; that men need a “good woman” by their side to take care of them because sometimes they are like children and can't do the simplest things; that women must be patient with them because they have an aggressive nature; and that is better to be wary of other women because they are almost all whores and will steal your man.

It was bullshit, of course, but I believed it and, unfortunately, it had a huge impact on the way I relate to others and my own sex. I did believe I had to sacrifice myself in order to be a good woman, obsessively forgiving men and pathologically distrusting all women. Having then found the “Wuthering Heights template” for “conducting a love affair” (Ellis, 2015: 203), it did not help me improve my already limping sentimental scaffolding.

Indeed, there is also an unbalanced relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. As seen before, he is a black boy reduced to semi-slavery and she is a white woman living a privileged situation, but it is an imbalance that the two continually try to overturn and challenge. Not with words, but with violence. If the racial and class gap that separates them seems insurmountable, the connection between their spirits manages to transcend it. Unlike Jane and Rochester, at least Heathcliff and Catherine realistically experience the opposing positions that the world has assigned to them. Unlike them, however, they only do things to hurt themselves and others, and condemn everyone to a truly gratuitous unhappiness. That's not exactly what I consider love. But again, when I first read the book, my thoughts were different.

I remember that I wasn't particularly struck by the number of dogs hanged throughout the story, nor by the insults and slaps Heathcliff generously bestows on his wife Isabella; I felt no pity for Edgar, Catherine's affectionate husband, nor for the unfortunate fates of the children the two protagonists had with partners they didn't really want. As I mentioned before, what struck me was the brute force of the recognition of the two protagonists' souls, their being purely themselves despite everyone and everything, especially when everyone and everything seems to be so silly, unfair and hypocritical. That is also why their attachment survives death and the justice of the earth: it is the only true thing they have, the only truth in their false world. This made me minimize and, at times, justify many of the misdeeds of the two anti-heroes, reinforcing an idea that I already had: that feelings to be authentical must in some way carry a bit of violence too. 

I report and translate the words of the Italian feminist Lea Melandri regarding the relationship between love and violence, and their normalized coexistence within past and present social structures:

“Violence was confused with the law, with tradition, with behavioural norms, with the exercise of a power considered 'natural'. [...] Man's domination over the woman is distinguished from all other historical power relationships by its profound and contradictory implications. First, the confusion between love and violence: we are faced with a domination that arises and imposes itself within intimate relationships, such as sexuality and motherhood. There are unsuspected kinships that many fail to recognize or prefer to ignore. The oldest and most enduring is the one that links love to hate, tenderness to anger” (2024: 102,103).

Believing that violence is one facet of love is counter-educational, unhealthy, and dangerous. In my case, it led me to a split: on the one hand, I sought the sublime in feelings that didn't exist, and on the other, I ignored the extremism of those I was experiencing. That is, since I had not understood which feelings should be valued, supported and followed, when I found myself in a toxic relationship, I couldn't recognize it as such because I believed that jealousy, possessiveness and outbursts of anger were part of the love pattern that blinded my partner. Moreover, when I too had to express a sense of strong attachment, I often found myself using violent language. Verbal and not only. 

I don't want to give this sad merit to Wuthering Heights. Instead, I'd point the finger at decades of mainstream Western filmmaking, healthy offspring of rape culture and more than a millennium of institutionalized misogyny, that have glamourised and continue to glamourise violence. And at an abysmal lack of emotional and sexual education for kids (at least in my home country), which could lead everyone, male and female, to become entrenched in gender roles and to reproduce abusive behaviours. But I must also say that Wuthering Heights’ plot, if interpreted uncritically or naively, could be controversial (and most of the films based on it are an unhappy demonstration of it). The love narrated is the typical love that – using Ellis’ words - “could only be written by someone who had never been in love” (2015: 203) and, I might add, by someone who doesn't give a damn about love.

Comparing over time the different types of relationships offered by the two Brontë sisters, I found myself faced with two almost opposite perspectives.

Although Charlotte's focus is on the single, non-wealthy woman's struggle for autonomy, dignity, and happiness, the love-story-pattern remains for her the culmination of a decent life for a girl, one that aligns with shared morality and with a marriage as a happy ending. If Charlotte has a political purpose behind her novelistic writing - and I think she had - she carefully keeps it within the bounds of acceptability. For Emily, however, the love story seems merely a pretext: for scandal (the relationship between her anti-heroes is semi-incestuous and outside of marriage); for exposing society's cruelty (there is no positive character in her novel); and for destroying a world she felt she could not change (it always seemed to me that revenge was not only the “sacred fire” of her characters, it was also the engine of her pen).

Where Charlotte is cautious and careful, Emily is transgressive and unscrupulous. Where Charlotte offers a new model of woman, determined, correct and pious, Emily creates a controversial, rude and capricious girl who rejects heaven (and therefore God). Where Charlotte is open to a dialogue with social norms, and to accept part of them, Emily is deaf to any cry of hope, and disgusted by the prospect of compromise. Where Charlotte is at the same time proactive and compliant, Emily is drastic and unapologetically cynical.

Just as I was wondering if there could be a middle ground between them, I discovered, at the edge of my 30s, the existence of the third Brontë sister: the underdog Anne.

Discovering Anne Brontë

While reading Charlotte's correspondence (Brontë, 2016) and Charlotte's biography, written by her friend Elizabeth Gaskell in 1857 (1998), I first met Anne and Bramwell Brontë, the younger sister and the alcoholic brother. Since I was not at all interested in the misadventures of yet another intellectual Victorian male victim of himself, I decided to concentrate only on the figure of Anne. But, from the very beginning, from the way Charlotte and Elizabeth described her, I immediately thought that her writings were not worth reading.

Throughout all the letters and the biography, Anne is presented as a translucent creature, the smallest and most fragile of the family, intelligent but without an authentic voice, extremely pious towards religion and kind to all the people around her but, apparently, lacking that romantic passion which instead stirred the souls of her sisters Charlotte and Emily, and also of their brother Bramwell. It was in this spirit that I purchased a copy of Agnes Grey (1996): with prejudice, driven only by an enormous sense of duty. As a fan of the Brontë sisters, Anne was a piece of the puzzle that I was missing.

I was sure I would find a boring novel, a cornucopia of clichés and mannered dialogues, an attempt to emulate Emily's tormented passions or Charlotte's gothic intrigues. In short: a lousy copy made by a little girl who died before reaching artistic maturity. Instead, right from the start, I understood I was wrong:

“But Mama, I am above eighteen and quite able to take care of myself and others too. You do not know half the wisdom and prudence I possess because I have never been tried.[...] You think, because I always do as you bid me, I have no judgment; but only try me - that is all I ask - and you shall see what I can do” (Brontë, 1996: 7).

When I read this dialogue, I felt it was very close to my personal experience as a young daughter, but I also realized its universal significance as a moment of transition between adolescence and youth. Agnes' voice is the voice of Anne, the youngest and underestimated sister. And it is the voice of a broader gender condition of women considered as “eternal minors”, as well as the condition that any kid encounters in a loving family context, regardless of their gender, when they want to test themselves and begin their journey as adults. 

The realism of the initial situation and the first dialogues was far removed from the scenarios presented by the two older sisters. Agnes is not an unfortunate orphan who grows up in a terrible female institution after her aunt abandons her (Jane Eyre); nor is she the only daughter who survives the death of her two parents, growing up under the tutelage of a tyrannical and alcoholic older brother (Wuthering Heights). Agnes is a beloved daughter, who lives in an "elegant house" and grows up in a "respectable" family that has given her the fortune of having two parents, married for love (her mother married "against the wishes of her friends"), and a living sister ("of six children, my sister Mary and myself were the only two that survived the perils of infancy and early childhood")(1996: 2). It may seem like a boring, almost banal beginning, if compared to the dark and intriguing backdrops in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but it gave me a sense of closeness, despite the centuries that separated us. And of humanity, despite the novel's fictional nature. I had the feeling that Anne, unlike her sisters, wasn't afraid of reality, that she didn't run away from it, and that she didn't even need to abstract it to convey the message she held dear.

Agnes Grey is the story of a young woman who dreams of emancipation in 1847 (“How delightful it would be to go out into the world,” says Agnes, “to enter upon a new life; to act for me; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers”. 1996:8) and clashes with her time's prejudices, double standards and economical barriers. Unlike Jane Eyre, who indicates teaching as the only decent job for a woman without actually loving it, and who describes female institutions as diabolical only to then send Rochester's daughter there, Agnes Grey believes in the work she wants to do as an instructor, she dedicates herself to it with self-denial, openly denouncing her difficulties and the stark realities of Victorian governess life instead of punishing her pupils. She says: “I thought, if I could struggle on with unremitting firmness and integrity, the children would in time become more humanized: every month would contribute to make them some little wiser, and, consequently, more manageable. […] I flattered myself I was benefiting my parents and sister by my continuance here; for small as the salary was, I still was earning something” (1996: 23, 24).

Agnes Grey is not naive. She knows that dreams are far from reality, but she wants to try to reach them anyway, not by sublimating herself into impossible love stories, but by committing herself without idealizing life. Unlike Jane and Cathy, Agnes is human. Moreover, unlike in Jane and Cathy’s story, the couple's relationship is not a source of meaning for her main characters, nor is love a remedy for life's concrete problems. Actually, as Ellis in Take Courage assures: “Anne didn’t think that [being saved by love] was possible” (2018: 210). Anne Brontë is totally singing from a different hymn sheet. A very modern one. One of the female characters in her novel will say: “If I could always be young, I would always be single” (Brontë 1996: 56) - maybe, it is even too modern!

Anne seems to be the only Brontë sister who has grasped Jane Austen's commitment to reality and social criticism - which funnily enough Charlotte judged as more real than true, and in any case never great (Wright, 1953) - to surpass it by creating a realistic character that does criticize society without strictly playing by its rules. In the same way she has taken up some of the central controversies in Charlotte’s and Emily's writings to transcend them too, renouncing the romantic taste for drama, and returning them to a scenario closer to everyday life and to the hope of change.

In this sense, Anne Brontë emerges as an authentic and hopeful voice, linked to reality without becoming cynical, like Emily; courageous because she is not willing to change her ideas for fear of not being liked, like Charlotte; and conscious of what suffering means, without hiding herself behind it like the dandy brother Bramwell. Her figure appears gigantic compared to the already considerable size of her sisters, and her words still ring true and are capable of awakening. Speaking of which, I must report an anecdote of a woman who was saved by Anne Brontë's novel:

“It’s by a Christian woman whose husband dragged her around by her hair, punched her and tried to brainwash her by highlighting passages of the Bible about how wives should submit to their husbands. He censored her reading, too, but he couldn’t see the harm in “The Tenant of Wildefell Hall” [Anne Brontë’s last novel]. It was just a Victorian novel; how dangerous could it be? As his wife read it, she felt like she was reading her own story. She thought that if a clergyman’s daughter could write a novel where a woman left a bad man like that, why should she stay with one 150 years later? It gave her the strength to get away from the abuse, to walk out of the story written for her and write her own” (Ellis, 2018:112).

Discovering Bramwell Brontë against my will

“To say the truth”, using a sentence that Anne Brontë repeats 16 times throughout Agnes Grey novel, Anne tells more truth than her sisters: in her writings there are no adulterous drunkards who redeem themselves thanks to the protagonist's virtue, nor Byronic heroes who turn their love into a curse because of a love that ended badly. Was it a dig at the male characters created by Emily and Charlotte? Of course, it is. And according to her latest novel published in 1848, The Tenant of Wildefell Hall (1996), it is also the sign that, unlike her sisters, Anne takes a different stance towards emotionally fragile, drunken, troublesome men, like their brother Bramwell, the probable source of inspiration for Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester. In this last novel Anne tells the story of a woman who runs away with her son, leaving her violent and drunken husband and building a new, happier life for herself. In a society that did not allow a wife to leave her husband nor conceive of talking about the effects of an abusive relationship, Anne chose to show the impact that a violent husband can have on the lives of a wife and her child, focusing on the latter's emotions and on the material conditions of hardship they have to face just to be safe. Id est, Anne is telling the truth: she is describing her contemporary reality and, above all, she is not giving space to, justifying or romanticising men who behave like shit.

Hers is an honest, farsighted, and avant-garde stance that, in some ways, Western culture has yet to metabolize. The fascination with the dandy man is a stereotype that still persists in the shape of the brilliant mind who falls victim to his own demons and wastes himself in debauchery, unaware that he is also hurting those he loves. It is not something relegated to romantic-gothic novels, even today there is the tendency to uncritically give space to this cliché and, worse, to give it many discounts. An interesting example can be considered the one present in the Haworth Museum, the very Brontë family’s house. 

The Museum shows visitors the Brontë family’s home as it would have looked at the time: the kitchen, the drawing room, the father's study, the various bedrooms, followed by a section specifically displaying the family’s belongings: the amazing miniature manuscripts compiled by the sisters and brother when they were children, various letters and documents, and the few surviving personal objects, including Charlotte's portable writing desk and one of her dresses. Aside from this last section, there is no real trace of the sisters' personalities in the rooms of the house, since the sisters did not have their own private study and they all wrote in the shared living room. Their personal effects are also few, as the house, being a parsonage, had become the property of a new family upon the death of the father. It seemed to me that the Museum had chosen to respect this void and not to remodel the rooms, keeping the final exhibition section for the sisters and the brother. I would have found it very reasonable if there hadn't been a room, in fact, completely reinterpreted and reconstructed: that of the brother, Bramwell.

Indeed, after The Walk Invisible (2016), a BBC film production on the life of the Brontë sisters shot inside their real home in Haworth, the Museum maintained the setup of Bramwell’s room as presented in the film: a chaotic setup, as if Bramwell was still there, leaving the bed unmade and all his drawings and notes scattered on the floor along with bottles and candles. In other words, it was a snapshot of his painful delirium and also the reconstruction of his creative fury. Why then hadn't they reconstructed the drawing room as well? I wondered. Why hadn't they given the same evocative and theatrical space to the sisters who, unlike Bramwell and despite their less privileged position, enjoyed incredible success for over 150 years? Why do the three sisters, not even in their own home, receive the attention and space they deserve for their own extraordinary talent? I believe that, in part, the answer lies precisely in the fascination with the cursed (male) artist, the dandy trope. But also in the fact that it still seems unacceptable that, for once in history, a man should be excluded from the podium of intellectual recognition. At least that's my reading: with this set up they gave Bramwell back his share of glory as an unfortunate misunderstood genius. 

What's amusing about this story, no matter how you look at it, is that despite having deliberately—and perhaps controversially—chosen to know nothing about Bramwell, his story is instead the one I took home from the Museum, much more than the stories of his sisters.

Ironically, I was forced to know about him against my will.

And I consider Bramwell’s case a striking example of how the dominant culture imposes itself: it draws attention to the models it wishes to preserve and reproduce, while downplaying the value of others' work by rendering the authors' personalities invisible—or by placing their books on the same shelf as children's classics like Pippi Longstocking, or in the discount box for beach reads.

My own "Brontë timeline", the history of my gradual discoveries about the sisters' novels, lives and personalities, bears the same testimony.

Cited works

Allen, A. (2024). “Bataille and the Poverty of Academic Form”, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 43, pp. 127–140.

Bataille, G. ed. (2012). Literature and Evil. London: Penguin Classics.

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Brontë, A. ed. (1996). The Tenant of Wildefell Hall. London: Wordsworth Editions.

Brontë, C. ed. (2014). Jane Eyre. Free Book. Available at: https://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/119-2014-04-09-Jane%20Eyre.pdf [Accessed: 07 June 2026].

Brontë, C. (2016). Ma la Vita è una Battaglia. Lettere di Libertà e Determinazione. Edited by Laura Ganzetti. Roma: L’Orma Editore.

Brontë, E. ed. (2003). Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin Classics.

Ellis, S. (2015). How to Be a Heroine. Or, What I’ve Learned From Reading too Much. London: Vintage Books.

Ellis, S. (2018). Take Courage. Anne Brontë and the Art of Life. London: Vintage Books.

Flint, E. (2026). “In the Age of the ‘Rough Sex Defence’, Emerald Fennell’s Treatment of Wuthering Heights’ Isabella Linton is Grotesque”, The Guardian, February 20, 2026. 

Gaskell, E. C. ed. (1998). The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: Penguin Classics. 

Jane Eyre (1996). Directed by Franco Zeffirelli [Film]. United International Pictures: Mediaset. 

Jantzen, G., M. (2020). “Feminists, Philosophers, and Mystics”, Hypatia, 9 (4).

Melandri, L. ed. (2024). Amore e Violenza. Il Fattore Molesto della Civiltà. Bollati Boringhieri: Torino.

Nolan, S. (2026). Good Woman. A Reckoning. London: Indigo Press.

The Walk Invisible (2016). Directed by Sally Wainwright [Film]. United Kingdom: BBC.

Wright, A. H. (1953). Jane Austen’s Novels. London: Chatto and Windus.