The Odd(est) Brontë: Portrait(s) of Emily as a Young Author

There is a paradoxical contrast between the quiet life of Emily Brontë and her passionate fiction offers no complete picture of the young woman in spite of the myriad biographies, legends, and myths about her life or the crushing number of critical responses to her fictions. Into this gap, neo-Victorian (re)visionings of and a (re)voicing of personal history allow for a reconsideration of Emily Brontë’s interests. To that end, Chap. 5 , “The Odd(est) Brontë: Portrait(s) of Emily as a Young Author,” considers Always Emily (2014) by Michaela MacColl and The World Within: A Novel of Emily Brontë (2015) by Jane Eagland. Both biofictional narratives reconstruct an image of Brontë despite the scant archival evidence because, like adult readers, adolescents are interested in the who and why of writers’ lives; in addition, readers seek a greater insight into the famous characters that such an author may have invented in their texts.