3. Emily Brontë and Byron

Patrick Brontë possessed the complete works of Byron, and the children read the extensive Life, Letters and Journals by Thomas Moore, in early adolescence. From the moment they came in contact with this ‘great man’ (as Charlotte called him)7 they became obsessed with a fever of Byronism. Charlotte concentrated on the myth of sexual seduction through Zamorna; Branwell on the ‘gloomy egoism’ of an idealised and self-doomed hero both flattered and outcast by the world. Emily found a resonance in Byron, a poetic legitimacy, for the violence of her passions, as well as adopting his persona to some extent in her diary notes whose style (as Winifred Gérin has noted) was modelled partly on his.8 Heathcliff is often regarded as an archetypal ‘Byronic’ hero, with his mysterious origins, lawlessness, fatal love, and self-induced death. Yet most readers of Wuthering Heights would accept that ultimately Heathcliff is a Byronic hero who outgrows and undermines his genre, being in fact part of a wider dialetic of romance and anti-romance. But Byron also subsumed this dialectic within himself; and asserted that though the common identification of himself with his own romantic heroes might be ‘near the truth’, yet ‘I doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth’.9 The image of the society hero was a kind of lie about himself as a poet. Both Emily Brontë and Byron therefore have a more complex vision of the hero than that encompassed by the ‘Byronic hero’ per se; and it is on this deeper level of affinity that the most interesting correspondences between them are to be found. Emily Brontë's assimilation of Byron did not (as is usually assumed) end with the lyrics, the romances and Manfred; it also included the ‘other side’ of Byron expressed in Don Juan and in his prose. Although she began with the romantic hero, the ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’, as she matured she became more interested in the metaphysics of the restless search for Poetry which, through parado