Poetry | June 02, 2021
Poems: Jane Satterfield
Jane Satterfield
Costumery: Cento with Lines from Early Reviews of Wuthering Heights
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë posed as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell to publish their work and be taken seriously as authors; rumors swirled around the nature of their identity and their novels’ composition.
The whole firm of Bell & Co.
staring down human life—
a depravity strangely their own
one family, one pen—
provincialisms, blasphemy, the brutalizing
influence of unchecked passion
Scenes so hot, emphatic,
and so sternly masculine in feeling
Its sex cannot be mistaken
even in manliest attire
A sprawling story casts a gloom
one presiding evil genius
two generations of sufferers
the highest effects of the supernatural
an atmosphere of mist . . .
A more natural unnatural story
we do not remember having read:
But what may be the moral?
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