FIRST RATE

Abstract

Janet Gezari's book has received well-deserved critical acclaim. It is a ‘thoughtful and sustained engagement with Emily Brontë's poetry’ whose close readings ‘combine textual scholarship, philological awareness and critical sensitivity in exemplary fashion’ (Joe Phelan in the TLS). It is ‘a powerful, persuasive, often moving reading of Brontë's poetry’ that examines the poems ‘very closely, paying attention to their handling of metre, rhyme, and other elements of prosody’, and it gives ‘all who care about the poetics of the lyric, ways and reasons to read the poems with attention, interest and pleasure’ (Beth Newman in The Review of English Studies). Last Things is indeed all that the reviews have claimed for it, but it is also a book with a mission – to rescue Brontë's poems from neglect – and in pursuit of that mission it analyses her poems as the work of a visionary intoxicated with life: passionate, independent, courageous, and dangerous. Because the book hopes to restore this ‘terrible’ Emily Brontë (the inverted commas are Gezari's), and because it is only 150 pages (not including critical apparatus), its account of the poems is partial in both senses of the word. Last Things ‘seeks to be comprehensive’, but something is missing from this otherwise first-rate study: a recognition that, in some of her poems, Brontë writes about life not ‘as if she cannot or will not let it go’ (the last words of Last Things), but as if she cannot and wishes she could.