The Glass Essay

"The Glass Essay” joins a large body of literature that confronts, reinforces, and plays with the various myths surrounding the three Brontës. Emily Brontë was born in 1818 and died in 1848. She had one brother, Branwell, and was one of five girls in her family. Two of her sisters died early on in her life. Her other two sisters, Charlotte and Anne, wrote poems and novels. Charlotte is the author of multiple novels, including Jane Eyre (1847). Anne is the author of two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Emily published one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), in her lifetime. She spent most of her life in a tiny English town called Haworth, where her activities centered on writing and traversing the moors.

Elizabeth Gaskell published her skewed biography of Charlotte and her family, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, in 1857. According to Juliet Barker’s biography The Brontës (2010), Gaskell’s text established Charlotte as a “long-suffering victim of duty,” Emily as the “wild child of genius,” and Anne as the “quiet, conventional one.” In 1961, Sylvia Plath wrote a poem, “Wuthering Heights,” that alludes to the disquieting elements attached to Emily and her novel. A couple of decades earlier, Rachel Ferguson played with the Brontë myth in her lighthearted novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1940).