Emily Bronte and the Religious Imagination

Readers of Emily BrontÁ's poetry and of <i>Wuthering Heights</i> have seen in their author variously a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian a heretic or a visionary mystic of the moors. Rather than seeking to resolve this matter <i>Emily BrontÁ and the Religious Imagination</i> suggests that such conflicting readings are the product of tensions conflicts and ambiguities within the texts themselves. Rejecting the idea that a single coherent set of religious doctrines are to be found in BrontÁ's work this book argues that <i>Wuthering Heights</i> and the poems dramatise individual experiences of faith in the context of a world in which such faith is always conflicted always threatened. BrontÁ's work dramatises the experience of imaginative faith that is always contested by the presence of other voices other worldviews. Her characters cling to visionary faith in the face of death and mortality awaiting and anticipating a final vindication an eschatological fulfilment that always lies in a future beyond the scope of the text.