Interpreting Emily: ekphrasis and allusion in Charlotte Brontë's 'Editor's Preface' to Wuthering Heights

In writing her ‘Editor’s Preface’ to Wuthering Heights in 1850, Charlotte Brontë reimagined Emily’s novel as a statue roughly hewn from ‘a granite block on a solitary moor’.1 The statue stands before us, wrought in words: an ekphrasis; a border-crossing between the arts, present here, in Brontë’s preface, as an attempt to render the visual and plastic in verbal form (and vice versa). This gesture is also multiply allusive, weaving together the language of Wuthering Heights, the judgement of literary critics, and ideas concerning poetry and permanence derived from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818). This article performs an extended close reading of the novel-statue, exploring the rhetorical work it performs as part of Brontë’s careful negotiation of Emily’s posthumous print identity. As an editor, biographer and preface-writer, Brontë used the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights to transform Emily’s art: she inscribes a different legacy for her sister, reimagining the dead novelist as a poet yet to find her audience.