In commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth on July 30, 1818 (d. 1848), Oxford University Press has reissued its Companion to the Brontës, by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith and seven other contributors.¹ Dozens of pages of maps, pictures, a section on Dialect and Obsolete Words, a Classified Contents List, and a three-column Chronology (The Lives of the Brontës, Literary and Artistic Events, Historical Events) accompany the nearly six hundred pages of compact, authoritative, and engaging (if frequently esoteric) entries with enormous variations in length.

These include “editing history of mature novels,” “verse dramas by Branwell Brontë” (there are three), “mythology, classical,” “Bible, the,” “reading public,” “imagery in the Brontës’ works” (richly revealing), much impressive material on the Brontës’ reading habits and their commentaries (they could mark up a book with the best of us), biographical entries that include journal entries and letters, and entries on the major works that include Composition, Manuscript and Early Editions, Sources and context, Plot, and Reception (as well as short bibliographies).

A casual browser will linger and, more often than not, be gripped. The entries on Emily moved me to re-read Wuthering Heights (1847), the greatest Brontë work, Emily’s only novel, and the book without which, frankly, there might not be a Companion. For it is no ordinary book but a growthfrom some desolate precinct of a haunted imagination. “The reality of unreality has never been so aptly illustrated,” wrote a reviewer in