Biographical Notes on the Pseudonymous Bells | Page 4

elder. Accordingly, she followed in the same path
with slower step, and with a patience that equalled the other's fortitude.
I have said that she was religious, and it was by leaning on those
Christian doctrines in which she firmly believed, that she found support
through her most painful journey. I witnessed their efficacy in her latest
hour and greatest trial, and must bear my testimony to the calm triumph
with which they brought her through. She died May 28, 1849.
What more shall I say about them? I cannot and need not say much
more. In externals, they were two unobtrusive women; a perfectly
secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits. In Emily's nature
the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an
unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside,
lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and
kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers
were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to
defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate
advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and
the world. Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her

interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her
spirit altogether unbending.
Anne's character was milder and more subdued; she wanted the power,
the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well endowed with quiet
virtues of her own. Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and
intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her
in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a
sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted. Neither Emily nor Anne
was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the
well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of
nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as
their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all
by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial
observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their
lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good
and truly great.
This notice has been written because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the
dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil.
CURRER BELL September 19, 1850.

EDITOR'S PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION OF 'WUTHERING
HEIGHTS'

I have just read over 'Wuthering Heights,' and, for the first time, have
obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are)
its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other
people--to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are
unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to
whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the
outlying hills and hamlets in the West Riding of Yorkshire are things
alien and unfamiliar.
To all such 'Wuthering Heights' must appear a rude and strange
production. The wild moors of the North of England can for them have
no interest: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and
household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must
be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and--where
intelligible--repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps, naturally very

calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind,
have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of
manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make
of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the
unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland
hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and
unchecked, except by Mentors as harsh as themselves. A large class of
readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the
pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has
become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only--a
blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this
circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a
rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by
single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons
are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which,
however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it
does-- what feeling it spares--what horror it conceals.
With regard to the rusticity of 'Wuthering heights,' I admit the charge,
for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and
knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be