Thank you for posting this. My favorite story of Emily Bronte has always been the one where she was bitten by a dog, and then proceeded to calmly cauterize her own wound with a hot iron poker. As a fellow middle child who was also overshadowed by an older sister, I've always admired her.
I imagine so. It's ironic, because in a flash, she did an ultimate act of self-preservation by cauterizing her wound, yet she was also anorexic, which I think is anything but self-preservation.
That was interesting right up until the end - and then it was infuriating. Having established that she was indeed '16" broad' and theorised that this was just because people were smaller then the author completely fails to try to establish whether that's true. Even though she's in a place with coffin size records of the era and could easily have checked it.
If you read to the end, it has this nice quote about the coffin size from a primary source:
I eventually found a transcript of the coffin maker’s book. Here it is, in his own words: “Emlea Jane Bronty. Died Dec 19th 1848 in the 30 year of hir Age. Coffen 5ft 7” long 16” broad.”
Note that the measurement there matches the body size, not the outside of the coffin with the wood included.
I think his/her point was that you could look at other coffin records from the same era and see if 16" breadth was about average or not for women of the same age and height.
