Emily and the Man
By Keech Ballard
Emily Jane Brontë identified as male in terms of gender, and preferred women as sexual partners, like her near contemporary and dear namesake Emily Dickenson, and her later admirer Virginia Woolf. Charlotte may not have approved of her sister’s peculiar predilections, but she loved Emily well enough to keep the home fires burning for her long after she was gone. Unlike baby sister Anne, who seemingly got the shaft. It was a different world back then.
Emily Jane wrote two types of poems, personal or confessional poems, and impersonal ahistorical fantastical Gondal epic narratives centered on the Queen of all she surveyed, a certain Augusta Geraldine Almeda, or A.G.A. for short. The two types of poems are sometimes difficult to distinguish in her writing, but that is just Emily, the original hybrid.
Augusta is a female version of August or Augustus, the first founder of Imperial Rome. Geraldine is a female version of Gerald, which derives from the German, a language with which Emily was intimately familiar, and means “spear ruler.” Almeda is a slight variant of Almeida (Port.) or Alameda (Span.), both of which derive from the Arabic for either city (Al Medina) or tableland plateau (Al Maidda). Given Emily’s natural proclivities, the meaning of tableland or plateau seems rather obvious as the first and best choice for translation purposes. If only they had moors in Morocco… But wait! They do have Moors!
The first Aga Khan became prominent as a British ally during the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1838-1842, if not slightly before. It is far from certain, yet not all that much of a stretch, to assume that A.G.A. was chosen as the Queen’s own personal acronym for what can only be described as political reasons.
The first four poems in Manuscript A were written during Emily’s short and mysterious sojourn at Law Hill School. Both Charlotte and her husband retitled numerous poems from the girl on the moor from around that same time as being somehow associated with love’s labour lost, never to be fully recovered again and again and again.
It appears that Emily destroyed everything she wrote prior to her brief tenure as a student at Roe Head School in 1835. This must have been a very traumatic incident in that event. Emily’s first folio (Manuscript A) is organized around her brief tenure at Law Hill School. This is exactly opposite her response to the misadventure that occurred at Roe Head School just a few short years before. The first four poems in Emily’s surviving canon describe the birth and early childhood of A.G.A. The first four poems in Manuscript A were written early in Emily’s tenure at Law Hill School.
Emily began three of her longer poems while at the Heger Pensionnat in Brussels. She finished the first of these while she was there. The other two had to wait until after she returned home on a voluntary basis and refused to leave, despite being invited to return to the Hegers along with her sister. Charlotte contributed exactly nothing other than the epistolary ephemera of belles lettres during her extended two-year stay with the Biedermeier bourgeoisie Heger family.
According to Charlotte, Emily stopped eating, became physically ill, and had to be sent home from Roe Head School after six weeks. Further to the point, Emily stopped eating, became physically ill, and had to be sent home from Law Hill School after six months. Nonetheless, Emily did not stop eating or become physically ill even after nine tortuous months at the Heger Pensionnat in the Ultima Thule of far distant Brussels, despite the most salient fact that neither the school, the professor, nor the students ever seemed to agree with her to any appreciable extent.
Emily spent more than six months at Cowan Bridge School when she was just six years old, where she never stopped eating, never became ill, and never had to be sent home, even though two of her older siblings did become ill, and were sent home, where they both died shortly afterwards from the deleterious effects of physical, mental, and emotional abuse, combined with galloping consumption. Emily and Charlotte were brought home as budding and blooming as spring flowers, just in time to witness the death of Elizabeth the Younger. Maria the Younger was already dead and buried before they made it back to Haworth.
The pattern of Emily’s secret poetry writing career does not agree with Charlotte’s cover story. There must be an alternative explanation that makes more sense.
As M. Heger and Charlotte both lionized and lamented, Emily, whose family nickname was “the Major,” might have done something with her life, if only she had been born a man. Not unlike Orlando of Virginia Woolf fame. And now for the first time in 175 years you know the truth about Emily and the man within.
AUTHOR BIO
Keech is a messenger from the ancient gods. Don’t hate him because he’s beautiful.
Angry Gable Press 