BOOK REVIEW / Desperately seeking the mysterious Emily: 'Emily Bronte: Heretic' - Stevie Davies: The Women's Press, 8.99 pounds

EMILY BRONTE is notoriously elusive. In life she does not seem to have made a single friend outside her immediate family, and she has been equally unwilling in death to share herself with her biographers. Unlike the other literary giants of the 19th century, she left almost nothing in the way of letters and diaries. But she did leave a single novel that has tantalised generations of readers. The apparent enigma of Wuthering Heights has left Emily ripe for mystification, and many writers have trawled their own imaginations for the missing links.

Stevie Davies is best known as a novelist, and this is more an extended work of criticism than a straightforward biography. The known facts of Emily's life are so sparse, and her contribution to literature so great, that this seems the most sensible way to approach her. Charlotte Bronte once wrote of her sister that an interpreter should have stood between her and the world. And Davies is far more concerned with re-reading Emily's personality in the light of her works than with rewriting the events of her life.

Emily has justly been called a sphinx, but Davies is at her best when she resists the temptation to solve her riddle, and celebrates the paradoxes in her nature. This was a woman whose poems suggest a self-sufficiency taken to the point of solipsism, yet who was pathetically dependent on her family; who refused point-blank to be ladylike, yet who found a 'delinquent' freedom within the home and its domestic duties; who devoted her life to the written word, yet who could not talk to strangers; and who was, in Davies's reading, profoundly aware of her own femaleness but utterly uninterested in the feminist struggle for social change.

Davies connects these paradoxes with the philosophy of contraries she explores in Emily's work, quoting Blake's idea that 'Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate. . .' The so-called 'mysticism' with its attendant images of misty swoonings up on the moors in the arms of the Absolute, has always been a problem: it simply doesn't accord with her terse and

intellectual style. I have always suspected that because of her gender and provincial roots, she has been regarded as an aberration rather than part of an intellectual tradition, and that her visionary philosophy could be better explained by putting her in the context of the history of ideas than by appealing to woolly concepts of 'natural genius'. Davies does just this, mentioning the German Romantics, and interpreting Emily's famous love of animals as a kind of proto-Darwinism. There could have been a little more evidence, but it is extremely refreshing to see her dogs and hawks placed in an intellectual rather than a sentimental context.

One of Davies's central themes is Emily's sexuality, and it is here that her reading becomes more speculative. She makes the important point that it is not (as many have assumed) a miracle that a virgin should have been able to write about sexual passion. She makes rather a meal of the claim that Emily might have masturbated - as if the mystic-orgasmic imagery of her poetry was no more than a Barclays Bank (as Kenneth Williams would have called it) recollected in tranquillity.

Davies's suggestion that Victorian women always experienced sex with their husbands as a painful and humiliating violation is too sweeping. It is, Davies says, her 'intuition' that Emily was a lesbian (though not a practising one). She admits she cannot prove this, yet presents Victorian society as one in which lesbianism was the only humane sexual alternative for women.