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Sam Huber

Hewn In A Wild Workshop

Most students of literature know Emily Brontë, or at least we think we do: brilliant, passionate, undisciplined, even feral, yet at the same time wan, reclusive, depressive, diminished. Her sister Charlotte wrote that Emily’s sole novel Wuthering Heights “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.”  Though she credits Emily with a greater mastery, Virginia Woolf’s praise for the novel infers a similarly alien energy: “It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparences with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.”

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The Brooklyn Rail

JUNE 2023

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