biographer, who featured herself as having paid “especial and respectful” attention to primary sources, misread the title of one of Emily’s manuscript poems as “Louis Parensell” instead of “Love’s Farewell” in her zeal to bring new light on a hypothesized lost lover, and then went on to unearth another dark secret, proposing that Emily had been “a member of that beset band of women who can find their pleasure only in women” (Moore, The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë). There were discussions as to how genuinely close Emily had been to her sisters Charlotte and Anne, or whether she in fact resented the older one and patronized the younger. Was she a domestic slouch, oblivious to all except her febrile imaginings and the wind howling over the moors? Or was she in fact something of a fifties housewife type, sweeping the floors, ironing the linens, and baking bread while her chronically depressed father took his meals in his room and her brother, Branwell, drank himself to death in the Black Bull tavern? Was her consuming interest in food and what was being prepared for meals by Tabby, the housekeeper, as evidenced by the few diary entries that have come down to us, a sign of a robust immersion in daily life or a clue to something more disturbing? (In A Chainless Soul, Frank makes a plausible case for diagnosing Emily as suffering an anorexic’s death by starvation.)

Some of the more unrestrained speculations tended to focus on the elusive genesis of Wuthering Heights. Emily’s ill-fated brother, Branwell, who had been earmarked within the family for artistic glory (money was scraped together to send him to London to pursue his artistic interests) but died ignominiously at the age of thirty-one, a hostage to gin and opium, was at the center of the theories that swirled around the decades-long disputed authorship of Emily’s novel. The controversy began with an article, published in 1867 and written by an acquaintance of Branwell’s, himself an amateur poet, which claimed that the author had once read a manuscript of Branwell’s that contained a scene and characters similar to those of Wuthering Heights (Miller, p. 229). This controversy—or “great Brontë conspiracy theory,” as Miller describes it (p. 228)—was fueled largely by disbelief that a reserved young daughter of a rural clergyman could have written so volcanic a book, but also on the basis of Branwell’s having shown early literary promise as a coauthor of the Brontë children’s joint writing efforts, an all-consuming escapist pastime that Charlotte would later refer to as their “web of sunny air” (Frank, p. 57). It was quickly taken up by other of Branwell’s friends, and although it was eventually demolished in Irene Cooper Willis’s The Authorship of Wuthering Heights (1936), the idea has continued to intrigue scholars and biographers up until the present day.

But by far the most intense (and screwy) psychological scrutiny was reserved for the close relationship between Branwell and Emily. After Charlotte had given up on him as a bad egg, Emily continued to stand by her older brother, calming him down and getting him to bed during his drunken outbursts. This aspect of the Brontë family life led to speculations about a possible incestuous aspect to Branwell and Emily’s relationship, especially in regard to its being the model for the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. (One theory suggested that Heathcliff was in fact the bastard son of Mr. Earnshaw and thus Catherine’s half brother.) Of course, this theory clashed with yet another view that saw Branwell as doomed by his closet homosexuality, which may or may not have emerged during the period he spent as a live-in tutor to a young boy, Edward Robinson; his employment ended in disgrace after Branwell was dismissed with the threat of scandalous exposure if he tried to get in touch with any of the family. Branwell later retailed this scandal as an adulterous affair he was having with his pupil’s mother.

The story line of Wuthering Heights is, on the sheer linear level of narrative, full of twists and turns so complex and unlikely as to verge on the tiresomely baroque when it is not being merely confounding. Truth be told, it is hard to remember the novel’s actual sequence of events—the who, what, where, and when—even while in the midst of reading it, just as it is difficult to keep the various Catherines apart. (Early in the novel, when the eerie, otherworldly aspect of the story we are about to