Emily's Ghost: A Novel of the Brontë Sisters

by Denise Giardina

Overview

"Denise Giardina's extraordinary gift for conjuring voices of the past has never been more bewitchingly deployed than here in Emily's Ghost—a romance so tormentedly devoted to its struggle toward truth that Brontë herself would be proud of it." —Madison Smartt Bell

Enigmatic, intelligent, and fiercely independent, Emily Brontë refuses to bow to the conventions of her day. She is distrustful of marriage, prefers freedom above all else, and walks alone at night on the moors above the isolated rural village of Haworth. But Emily's life is turned upside down by the arrival of an idealistic clergyman named William Weightman. A heart-wrenching love story, Emily's Ghost plumbs the depths of faith, longing, and romantic solitude.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393071351
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/25/2025
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	337
File size:	955 KB

About the Author

Denise Giardina is the author of Storming Heaven, Emily's Ghost, and Saints and Villains, which won the Boston Book Review Prize. She is an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church and lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

Giardina turns from socially conscious historical novels (Fallam's Secret, 2003, etc.) to a fictionalized biography of sui generis poet and novelist Emily Bronte. It begins with a flash-forward in which Emily, anticipating her death from consumption, begins to read her masterpiece Wuthering Heights to her indulgent father Patrick, a venerable Yorkshire clergyman. The story then focuses on Emily's childhood as one of five sisters, two of whom predecease her, and the bond of solidarity formed with siblings Anne and Charlotte, who will also live to write memorable fiction. Headstrong Emily incurs the displeasure of her masters at the Clergy Daughters' School, to which the Bronte girls are sent to prepare for careers as governesses, and upon returning home scandalizes neighbors by roaming the moors unchaperoned, accompanied by her favorite dog and trained hawk. But her horizons expand significantly when handsome young curate William Weightman arrives to assist elderly Reverend Bronte. Weightman's romantic imagination and passionate solidarity with exploited workers agitating for overdue reform attract Emily's sympathetic attention and eventually her devotion. A catastrophic cholera outbreak destroys the incipient lovers' dreams, and Emily retreats into the world of her teeming imagination, creating her passionate antagonist Heathcliff out of Weightman's stoical decency and her own austere independence. Giardina's research tends to occupy undue space and slacken the narrative pace. But the surpassingly strange Bronte family, which also includes surly ne'er-do-well brother Branwell, offers a fascinating spectacle, and the reader's attention is held throughout several labored and redundantsequences. Most interesting, perhaps, is the pointed contrast Giardina presents between Emily's untrammeled, indeed often admirable egoism and Charlotte's emotional meanness and ruthless careerism. Something less than the definitive portrait of a frustratingly elusive great writer, but an agreeable read nonetheless, and a good bet for reading groups.

Kirkus Reviews