Who wrote Wuthering Heights?. (26th June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: McCarthy, Rachel; O'Sullivan, James
• Is Part Of: Digital scholarship in the humanties. Volume 36:Number 2(2021)
• Page Start: 383
• Page End: 391
• Publication Date: 2020-06-26
• Subjects: Philology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Computational linguistics -- Periodicals; 410.285
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqaa031
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2055-768X

Abstract

Abstract: Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It was not until the later second edition, published after Emily's death, that she was credited as the novel's author. Those Victorian attitudes towards women which compelled Brontë to publish as Bell have not been wholly eradicated, with her legitimacy as the sole author being called into question by male commentators at several junctures since. Their claim is that Emily's brother Branwell is the real author of Wuthering Heights . Using stylometry, a computer-assisted technique which measures the likely author of a text, this brief experiment demonstrates that it is highly unlikely that Branwell Brontë contributed to the writing of Wuthering Heights, and that Emily, as generally considered, is the novel's sole author. Furthermore, considering a number of limitations with the corpus being tested, this study provides a good and necessary example of stylometry in practice, and how such an experiment should be conducted in less-than-ideal circumstances.