Sunday, February 03, 2019
Between God and Me
Katherine Frank, A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), p. 109, with notes on pp. 277-278:
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During a visit to the parsonage, Mary Taylor recalled that one evening she told Charlotte and Emily how someone had pumped her for her religious views and she had retorted: '"that that was between God and me." Emily (who was lying on the hearth rug) exclaimed, "That's right."' It was all, Mary said, she 'ever heard Emily say on religious subjects'.16 Emily was the only Brontë daughter who was exempted from teaching Sunday school and who did not attend church regularly. And then we have Emily's own verdict on conventional religions in a poem written some years later:
Vain are the thousand creeds16. Joan Stevens, Mary Taylor, p. 164.
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.17
17. Poems, p. 243.
