Who really wrote Wuthering Heights?

[wordsworth]

The popular belief of course is that Emily Bronte wrote this 19th century classic but if one scratches the surface, one will discover there’s an altogether different story here.

While the three Bronte sisters, Emily, Anne and Charlott met with great literary success with Withering Heigths, Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre, biographers suggest that it was actually their genius brother Branwell Bronte who was behind it all.

So why did he alone perish in anonymity? It’s a sad story of a man whose fertile mind and high flights of fancy were never allowed to take wings in the real world. As a child, Branwell was the leader among his sisters. If he cried, they cried. He laughed, they laughed. They followed him everywhere; delighted by the fantastical characters he created and awed by his brilliance. Branwell’s ‘infernal’ world was full of kings, queens, ghosts and worriers. He liked blood and gore in his stories and almost convinced himself and his sisters that such a world actually existed.

Many believe that Heathcliff was his own creation, which Emily developed further. One can’t deny that Emily wrote Wuthering Heigths but the ideas, characters and inspiration behind the story was indeed Branwell’s.


Till the age of 19, hopes were still riding very high on this whiz kid. Everyone, knew that great things awaited him and Branwell was almost certain to make a great name for himself. This is one of the reasons why their aunt didn’t deem it necessary to leave any money for him in her will. So confident was she of her nephew’s prospects that she divided her money among the three girls instead. Ironically, he needed the money most at a later stage.

Branwell was rejected at a premium painting school that came as a shock. After that, there were a series of disappointments. Wordsworth to whom he sent a selection of his poems for his opinion gave him no reply. Several publishers rejected his work and slowly disappointment started to set in. He was 23 and nothing was working for him still. Not that the young man was not trying. He knew he had the talent but there was no reassurance that was coming forth from the literary world.

In his late twenties, a slow resignation started to creep into his poems. A particularly poignant line was ‘I lost the race I never ran’


The sisters were tiring of him, though they did bail him out at several points. They were sympathetic towards him but couldn’t bare to see him living life a wastrel. They didn’t realize that Branwell was trying hard for a break.

Charlott, who published Jane Eyre under a pseudonym, met with great success. Wuthering Heights got some critical acclaim but overall, it was considered a
far-fetched, weird sort of story. Later of course, it won its rightful place in literary history.

The sisters preferred not to tell their brother about the success of Jane Eyre. As Charlotte said later after his death, “We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent and talents misapplied. No he will never knew…”


But the truth was different. Branwell knew about these novels. How could he not,? Especially when most of it consisted of his own thoughts and ideas?
He too preferred to stay quiet, not letting them draw any happiness from the fact that he already knew it.

At 31, he was still languishing after the failures of a couple of jobs.
He said in one of his letters, “I know I also had stuff enough in me to make popular stories, but the failure of the Academy plan ruined me. I was felled, like a tree in the forest, by a sudden and strong wind, to rise no more. I simply degraded me in my own eyes and broke my heart,”


A few days later, he died suddenly.

Many feel Branwell’s trouble started when he couldn’t differentiate between childhood fantasy and adulthood but personally I think, fate too was exceptionally cruel to this affectionate, sensitive and brilliant man.


-Wordsworth

[ennison]

It was really Shakespeare's wife. Don't tell. The CI !=@**! A are keeping it from us.

[holyknight1313]

That is so awesome! Thank you for sharing this news with us! I applaud you on your knowledge! *applauds wildly* ^_^

[JBI]

That's a little far fetched... Influences don't write the book, they just help bring it to life... That's like saying someone's parent wrote a book, when really it was the person...

[holyknight1313]

What that guy said up there :thumbs_up is nice but I still applaud you on your knowledge ^_^

[vin1391]

Branwell could have influenced their thoughts...but then they are siblings...so it could run in the family...Thats what I think.I also think that it was Emily herself who wrote Wuthering heights...

[staticgirl]

I don't get the impression that Emily and Branwell really co-wrote like Branwell and Charlotte did. Emily and Anne had their own island, Gondal, and Charlotte and Branwell competed with each other in their fictions set in their West African territory and the metropolis of Glasstown.

They were all influenced by Byron and Wellington but Branwell and Charlotte were excited by politics and military adventure. Charlotte had a romantic (small r and large R) obsession with Wellington which transfered to Charlotte's imaginary son of Wellington. Branwell had been describing drinking scenes with rough types in taverns long before he'd touched a drop.

Emily and Anne's juvenile work was characterised with less politics and more realism based on the people and countryside around them. This you can clearly see in Wuthering Heights. Emily isn't in love with upper-class people like Charlotte was in Jane Eyre (lovingly describing Blanche Ingram and Mr Rochester. Jane gets to marry the posh bloke in the end too.)

At the time of writing Wuthering Heights, Branwell had placed quite a few poems in the northern daily papers under the pseudonym Northangerland and was the first of the siblings to be published. Given the amount of times his father had been published in those same papers, I bet Patrick was very proud of his son. Sadly, he started drinking destructively after the failure of his love affair with Lydia Robinson and was beginning to fail physically.

I suspect if he hadn't entered a very deep depression and alcoholism, he too would have written his own, rather macho, novel with lots of excitement and adventure and been published alongside the sisters. I think he would have been a roaring success too*. It's very sad.

*even if, like Emily And Anne, that success came later rather than sooner.

[JCamilo]

The only evidence that Emily didn't wrote her book is that there was a man in her family. That is soooo awesome, there is century that people know it and still turn back to the same theory...

[Newcomer]

The popular belief of course is that Emily Bronte wrote this 19th century classic but if one scratches the surface, one will discover there’s an altogether different story here.
-Wordsworth

Wordswort this is truly an astonishing discovery! How can we thank you?

“While the three Bronte sisters, Emily, Anne and Charlott met with great literary success with Withering Heigths, Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre, biographers suggest that it was actually their genius brother Branwell Bronte who was behind it all.” - Wordswort, you shall certainly make a name for yourself!

I'm dumbfounded how wrong I was to accept the validity of the historical data about Branwell. I shall be most grateful when you can supply corroborating evidence to set the facts straight so that we all can give due credit to 'their genius brother' and restore the honor due ' to this affectionate, sensitive and brilliant man.'.
Let me list my misconceptions:

a) 'Branwell was rejected at a premium painting school that came as a shock.'
The sisters and the father expected that as the only heir, Branwell would provide for the family. Consequently they used their meager savings as well as a loan from the aunt to send him to London where he had an introductory letter of reference to study with a well known painter so that he could be accepted into the Royal Academy Schools. Apparently he never used the letter of introduction, never gets to the schools, instead, he roamed the streets of London, wasting his money on alcohol.

b)'I was felled, like a tree in the forest, by a sudden and strong wind, to rise no more.'
In 1838 he goes to Bradford to become a portrait painter. He fails. Through recommendations of relatives, in 1840 he gets a position of an assistant clerk in Sowerby Bridge Railway Station. He is dismissed when it is discovered that a sum of moneys is missing that was under his care.
In January 1843 Anne has managed to secure post of tutor for Branwell with the Robinson family at Thorp Green. In July 1845 he is dismissed from his post as tutor, It was discovered that he had an affair with Mrs Robinson.

c)'But the truth was different. Branwell knew about these novels. How could he not,? Especially when most of it consisted of his own thoughts and ideas?'
How can we rely on the sisters claim that Branwell never knew of their witting?They only lived with him after all, while you have incontrovertible proof for your statement. Will you share it with us?

d)'Emily wrote Wuthering Heigths but the ideas, characters and inspiration behind the story was indeed Branwell’s.
Hear, hear! Quite right old chap! Everyone knows that women are incapable of any creative work. Their's is only the secretarial labors.

e) Branwell sent written work, for publication or critical judgement, to those he himself admired, including, Blackwood's Magazine, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hartley Coleridge, but the only work he ever had published, were a handful of poems in Yorkshire newspapers. Here is a sample of Branwell's ''their genius brother'.

[Gisborne was Mrs. Robinson's maiden name. This poem contains Branwell's reflections on the times he spent with her at her home, Thorp Green.]

On Ouse's grassy banks - last Whitsuntide,
I sat, with fears and pleasures, in my soul
Commingled, as 'it roamed without control,'
O'er present hours and through a future wide
Where love, me thought, should keep, my heart beside
Her, whose own prison home I looked upon:
But, as I looked, descended summer's sun,
And did not its descent my hopes deride?
The sky though blue was soon to change to grey -
I, on that day, next year must own no smile -
And as those waves, to Humber far away,
Were gliding - so, though that hour might beguile
My Hopes, they too, to woe's far deeper sea,
Rolled past the shores of Joy's now dim and distant isle.

Are we to agree with Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hartley Coleridge, when such work of genius is before our own eyes?

[Newcomer]

Anxiously awaiting the reply from Wordswort on 'Who really wrote Wuthering Heights?'. The evidence that “this whiz kid” Branwell was the true author and Emily only the secretary! Surely for one trained in deciphering the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of God, should have no trouble in establishing the authorship of the Song of Heathcliff.
You must prove that 'fate too was exceptionally cruel to this affectionate, sensitive and brilliant man.', else share his reputation. Please ' scratch the surface' a bit deeper, else we have to conclude that Wordswort is Worthless.

[kiki1982]

He is dismissed when it is discovered that a sum of moneys is missing that was under his care.

The sum of money did indeed disappear but it wasn't stolen by him, as you seem to make out. The clerk that was under Branwell's supervision in the station fiddled with the accounts so there was money missing and because of his responsibility, Branwell was dismissed. Consequently it had nothing to do with him and so it can have come on as a shock.

31/03/1842
Branwell Bronte was dismissed from his post as Clerk in charge of Luddenden Foot station near Hebden Bridge. There was a deficit in the station accounts attributed to Branwell Bronte's incompetence rather than theft. (From the Haworth Village web site)


How can we rely on the sisters claim that Branwell never knew of their witting?They only lived with him after all,


There are several sources on the internet that claim that, through his addiction of alcohol, he suffered from delirium tremens (type of madness caused by lack of alcohol after addiction: desorientation, hallucinations, insomnia...). So in consequence it can well have been possible that he didn't know about what his sisters were doing.
But then again, those attacs of delirium don't go on forever and there are lapses in between when patients have an active mind, so he could have figured something out. They never told him, but that doesn't say definitely that he didn't know at all. It is not because a few people think that someone doesn't know, he indeed doesn't...

the validity of the historical data about Branwell

It depends on what historic data you mean of course...
This article www.enotes.com/nineteenth-century-criticism/patrick-branwell-bronte states that Charlotte wrote some bitter letters about him and so his reputation was ruined. Charlotte hadn't even spoken to him since two years before he died. She even wrote after his funeral: 'I do not weep from a sense of bereavement … but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. … There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death, such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe.' So the judgement of Gaskell was not much better. Branwell's friend Leyland did try to do something about this but didn't succeed as the book was dull, according to the public. Some of Branwell's work was possibly burnt by the family because of the 'immorality' and 'religious scepticism' of it. Scolars even believe that only one tenth (!) of his work has survvied the ages.
Fortunately, in the 1960s, a woman named Daphne Du Maurier, took his work and studied it for what it was, rather than what it had been made out to be. Since then, scolars more and more agree, that he was not at all a bad writer and untalented, but just not valued.

He was indeed a creative mind so it is well possible that the sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne did take some of his ideas. But which writer doesn't do that? Everything a writer hears, smells, reads, learns, experiences etc. molds him and his books, like those things mold normal people's lives.

It would be very interesting to look at the Brontë sisters works and look at the similarities (like all the main male characters, all the female protagonists etc) and even the influence Branwell and the other sisters had on it.

Further more, fate was indeed not very positive towards Branwell... Maybe he didn't end up as an apprentice to that painter and he did squandre his money (although not all sources agree on that), but it was quite unjust to fire him because of a clerk who fiddles with the accounts. About the affair with Mrs Robinson: he received various presents of her. So his love was returned... Yet she kept her silence when her husband finally died, according to Gaskell because the husband had said in his will that his widowed wife was never to see Branwell again or the fortune she inherited was to be taken away. One would become depressed for less... On top of that he developed tuberculosis, but that was not discovered, because of his addictions, until he was already dying from it. You can't say that all of that was his own fault... There are people in the same situation every day even now.
Yet it is very strange that in those days apparently there were real Byronic characters about. Beethoven was also such one... Like Schiller and more of them...

To think that a writer, female or male, operates on his own, creating his own ideas, is a very narrow view. They, as we have, have their ideas of the world and will write about them. They are molded by experiences and what they were taught as children so in consequence, Branwell did have something to do with Wuthering Heights and so it was not solely Emily's creation because Emily was not a hermit and didn't live shut up with no human contact. Of course to say that it was really Branwell's book is driving it a little far but claiming the opposite is too far to the other side of the spectrum.
Some people may not like this, but literature is wider than the writer him/herself

Of course, before everyone thinks that I do believe this theory, I DO NOT BELIEVE BRANWELL WAS BEHIND IT ALL. He probably had some influence and that's where it ends, but it would be something interesting to study...

[Leila APEnglish]

REDICULOUS.

no offense or anything, but that deffinitly ties in with a male dominated society, which the purpose of Wuthering Heights is to condemn that.

[phoebelll25]

REDICULOUS.

no offense or anything, but that deffinitly ties in with a male dominated society, which the purpose of Wuthering Heights is to condemn that.

but we must know the truth behind the book.

[JCamilo]

Do we ?
Anyways, the truth is that the Bronte sisters used nicknames to publish their works because it was a male dominated society and when it was discovered that they did it, few people could accept and they pointed to his brother as the creator of their books because they could not accept it.
The reasons given are lousy, make no sense and often could not even explain how Emily was so different from Charlotte...