The History of Literature – Episode 763: Emily’s Desk Drawer

Host: Jacke Wilson
Date: January 1, 2026

Episode Overview

Jacke Wilson embarks on a fascinating literary detective journey into the mind and experience of Emily Brontë during her brief time as a published novelist. The episode’s heart lies in examining the five contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights that Brontë herself clipped and saved in her desk drawer before her untimely death in 1848. Wilson explores what these first reactions from her peers may have meant to Brontë, stripped of later acclaim, and reflects on how her work’s “strangeness” became its legacy.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Framing the Episode: Emily Brontë’s Moment as a Published Novelist

• Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in December 1847, and within a year, she had both lived as a novelist receiving critical feedback and died (aged 30).
• Jacke sets the context: "For barely a year of her life, she was a published novelist with reviews to show for it. What did those reviews say to her about her and her work?" (01:01–01:13)

2. The Mystery of the Bells

• The Brontë sisters used ambiguous, androgynous pseudonyms (Currer, Acton, Ellis Bell), leaving contemporary reviewers and readers mystified regarding their identities.
• Reviewers compared Wuthering Heights endlessly to Jane Eyre, often to Emily’s disadvantage.

3. Writers Confronting Their Own Reception

• Jacke likens reading reviews to hearing a child’s first parent–teacher conference or hearing one’s own obituary while alive—a revealing and potentially transformative experience.
• “Publishing your poems and your novel is a bit like this … Oh, you thought my book was boring? Hmm. Or, oh, maybe that author was too preachy. Ah, I didn’t see that about myself…” (09:22)

4. Extracts and Analyses of the Five Reviews

Review 1: The Atlas (January 1848)

• Describes Wuthering Heights as "a strange, inartistic story," with "rugged power" and "an unconscious strength."
• The story is “inexpressibly painful,” full of “shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity,” and leaves a “gloom over the mind … not easily to be dispelled.”
• Unforgettable turn of phrase:

  “Wuthering Heights casts a gloom over the mind and not easily to be dispelled. It does not soften, it harasses, it extenterates.” (22:30)

• Characters are either "utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible...a group of deformities."
• Jacke’s reflection: "Imagine what this would be like for Emily, to work so hard at a novel...and to find that it had this kind of effect on the reader. You think, well, I thought I was writing a love story." (28:51)

Review 2: Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (January 1848)

• Immediately calls Wuthering Heights a “strange sort of book, baffling all regular criticism.”
• Notes the “brutal cruelty and semi-savage love” and admits to finding no real moral.
• Quotes:

  “It is impossible to begin and not finish it, and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.” (33:05)

• Praises novelty but cites "great power, but a purposeless power."
• “A far more promising fault… than if they were deficient,” hinting that excessive talent is better than mediocrity.

Review 3: The Examiner (January 1848)

• Opens: "This is a strange book."
• Finds it “wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable,” suggesting the people in the drama are “savages rather ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.”
• Heathcliff is described as "an incarnation of evil qualities...linked to one virtue and a thousand crimes."
• Suggests the author, if he writes again, should “eschew exaggeration and obscurity.”
• Jacke reflects: “This is how the reviews of a masterpiece should be. It should strike reviewers as strange and unusual. It should shock them out of complacency.” (48:18)

Review 4: The Britannia (January 1848)

• Uses a long nature metaphor: “There are scenes of savage wildness in nature which, though they inspire no pleasurable sensation, we are yet well satisfied to have seen…”
• Declares the work is "strangely original," with “no green spots in it on which the mind can linger with satisfaction,” and possessing “the vigor of one positive idea, that of passionate ferocity.”
• Concludes:

  “There is singular power in his portraiture of strong passion. He exhibits it as convulsing the whole frame of nature, distracting the intellect to madness and snapping the heartstrings.” (1:00:43)

• Struggles to deliver a decisive judgment, calling the novel a “fragment, yet of colossal proportion and bearing evidence of some great design.”

Review 5: Unidentified (Clipping from Desk Drawer)

• The warmest review; calls it “a work of great ability…” with “many chapters to the production of which talent of no common order has contributed.”
• Notes the story’s effect on the reader:

  “…it is quite impossible to read the book…without feeling that if placed in the same position as any one of the characters…our conduct…being precisely such as the author has assigned.” (1:13:30)

• Encourages readers to pick up the book to experience a wide swath of emotions and humanity.
• Jacke observes: “That’s a pretty good review. It does mention strange…making us go five for five with the word strange. But I think Emily would not mind the word strange so much in this review.” (1:16:07)

5. The Recurrent Theme: 'Strange'

• Every review (explicitly or implicitly) keys in on the "strangeness" of Wuthering Heights—whether as a complaint or a marvel.
• Jacke ponders whether Emily would have been troubled by being called “strange,” ultimately suggesting she wouldn’t, staying true to herself:

  “I have a feeling that Emily Brontë would not object to that. And if it means original and if it means powerful…what author would object to that?” (1:17:30)

6. The Legacy of Brontë’s “Strangeness”

• Jacke relates the reviewers’ pleas for more conventional storytelling and “sunshine” to later calls for literary innovators to moderate their genius.
• He compares these initial reviews to the reception of literary masterpieces by figures like Joyce, Proust, Nabokov, and Dostoevsky.
• On Brontë’s defiance:

  “Emily said, I prefer to be as God made me. I am as God wished me to be…I’m not changing for you. I’m just not.” (1:18:54)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power, an unconscious strength which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage." (Atlas, 23:00)
• "It is impossible to begin and not finish it, and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it." (Douglas Jerrold, 33:05)
• "This is a strange book." (Examiner, 48:10)
• "There is singular power in his portraiture of strong passion. He exhibits it as convulsing the whole frame of nature, distracting the intellect to madness and snapping the heartstrings." (Britannia, 1:00:43)
• “If placed in the same position as any one of the characters… the chances would be 20 to 1 in favor our conduct in that position being precisely such as the author has assigned…” (Unidentified, 1:13:30)
• Jacke: “The reviewers have been begging, pleading with the author: Come back to the shore where it’s safe. … 175 years of readers have said, wow... Give us those waters. We’ll swim out there with you.” (1:11:47)
• “I am as God wished me to be... I like strange. I love strange. And I don’t care if that means I’ll have ten readers or ten million, because we know the answer to that. She’s had ten million at least and counting.” (1:19:18)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Emily Brontë’s context & episode intro: 00:01–08:30
• Publishing under pseudonyms; Brontë family mystery: 08:32–13:00
• Writers and receiving reviews/early reactions: 13:01–19:00
• Review 1 (Atlas): 22:00–29:30
• Analysis & Reflection (Review 1): 29:31–32:00
• Review 2 (Douglas Jerrold): 32:05–37:40
• Emily Brontë’s personality & family reflections: 37:41–46:00
• Review 3 (Examiner): 48:10–54:45
• Legacy of the “strange” masterpiece: 54:46–58:30
• Review 4 (Britannia): 58:31–1:07:00
• Discussion: strength in roughness/unpolished art: 1:07:01–1:11:40
• Review 5 (Unidentified): 1:13:00–1:16:30
• Conclusion: What Emily may have thought; embracing strangeness: 1:16:31–end

Takeaways for Listeners

• The episode is a meditation on authorial authenticity and the perils—and victories—of being “strange.”
• Jacke invites listeners to be like Emily: "Let’s be Emilys this year. Embrace the strange and embrace yourself. If that’s who you are. Be yourself proudly and defiantly. Give us that creativity that can only come from you.” (1:20:13)
• In the end, the very “strangeness” that baffled and unsettled first readers became the book’s enduring power and universal appeal.

For anyone who wants to understand both the experience of Emily Brontë as a first-time novelist and the way that literary reputation can shift through time, this episode is a compelling, empathetic, and richly insightful listen.