| All three sisters, as Stevie Davies remarks in
her introduction, were Romantic in inspiration, writing poetry
of passionate personal feeling and of pure imagination. They
share certain themes: liberty, loneliness, love, and harbour
the myth of a lost paradise. Read together with their novels,
the poems movingly elucidate the ideas which the narratives
revolve. And they surprise us out of our conventional notions
of the sisters' personalities, for example Emily's rebelliousness
being counterbalanced here by great tenderness. This
selection gives an idea of the variety of thought and feeling
within each author's work, and of the way in which the poems
of these three remarkable writers parallel and reflect each
other. |
