Last Things

At present, Emily Brontë's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Bataille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Brontë had a mystical experience because she 'reached the very essence of such an experience'. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. For admirers of Wuthering Heights, Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

Readership: Scholars, students, and fans of the Brontës, as well as those interested in Victorian poetry and women's writing generally.

Janet Gezari, Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor of English, Connecticut College

"Janet Gezari's book has received well-deserved critical acclaim." - Debra San, Essays in Criticism

"the most sensitive, sympathetic, discriminating account of the work to date... powerful, persuasive" - Beth Newman, Review of English Studies

"...a powerful, persuasive, often moving reading of poems, Brontë's poetry that reveals a subtle craftsmanship in the service of an unorthodox vision...Last Things gives not only devoted readers of Brontë (the usual audience for the poems), but all who care about the poetics of lyric, ways and reasons to read the poems with attention, interest and pleasure." - Beth Newman, The Review of English Studies

"Gezari, editor of Emily Jane Bronte: The Complete Poems, is an excellent guide to work, that Virginia Woolf thought would outlive Brontë's famous novel. Doubtless, the book is aimed at students and academics, but there is much here for the general reader." - The Book Depository

"Absorbing...[Gezari's] thoughtful and sustained engagement with Emily Brontë's poetry has nothing of the brittle 'argument' of much contemporary critical discourse. Last Things provides an example of what reinvigorated critical humanism might look like." - Joe Phelan, TLS

"A significant and important addition." - BronteBlog

Introduction: And First
1: Last Things
2: Fathoming 'Remembrance'
3: Outcomes and Endings
4: Fragments
5: The First Last Thing
6: Posthumous Brontë

Read an interview with Janet Gezari