Talk:Emily Brontë/GA2

GA review

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Nominator: ArthurTheGardener (talk · contribs) 16:58, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Reviewer: Tim riley (talk · contribs) 09:59, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Initial comments

A few comments on the prose. Most of them are merely suggestions, but the Manual of Style points should certainly be addressed, and I think you should check the point about "contagious" -v- "infectious" and correct if necessary.

General

• Your fondness for the word "however" becomes repetitive, and more often than not the word adds nothing to the meaning and is mere verbiage. What does it usefully add to these?

• However, Emily left after only a few months
• However, her health suffered
• However, the Jenkins family soon ceased to invite the sisters
• However, Constantin Heger, who was in charge of the academy, thought highly of Emily
• However, the sudden illness and death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, forced the sisters' return
• However, she remained in Haworth

It is a mere superstition that one should never begin a sentence with "However," but it should be done discriminatingly.

Manual of Style

• The Manual of Style stipulates the use of "logical punctuation" – thus, e.g., in "like twins."[30] the full stop should follow the closing quotation marks.
• The manual also specifies a space on either side of dots in ellipses: so that .e.g. "Emily...was so absorbed in herself" should be "Emily ... was so absorbed in herself"
• We put a full stop at the end of a picture caption only if the caption is a full sentence and there shouldn't be one in "Cowan Bridge School, now known as The Brontë School."
• Titles of cited works should be in title case, regardless of how the authors, publishers or catalaloguers treated them. (I think this a silly rule, but a rule it remains.)
• Spaced en-dashes rather than hyphens should be used in, e.g. refs 6 and 96 and anywhere else.
• Your citation style should be consistent: why

• Barker, Juliet (1994). The Brontes. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. 245. ISBN 978-0297812906 and
• Barker, Juliet (2010). The Brontes. Abacus. p. 252. ISBN 978-0748122189, but
• Fraser, The Brontës, p. 16
• Fraser, A Life of Anne Brontë, p. 39

• Citation 82 is plainly insufficient.
• In citation 109, title case, not all-caps, please.

Individual points

• "… their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Aside from brief intervals at school, she was mostly taught at home" – two points here, First, why the AmE "aside from" rather than the BrE "apart from"? Secondly, the last person named before "she was mostly taught" was Elizabeth Branwell, but the "she" is actually Emily.
• "The Brontë family lived on Market Street, in Thornton" – another not very welcome Americanism. The traditional English version is "in So-and-So Street".
• "unsanitary conditions" – the normal adjective is "insanitary" (and the only form known to the Chambers Dictionary, though "unsanitary" gets a passing mention in the OED)
• "outbreaks of contagious disease such as typhoid and tuberculosis" – if I correctly understand it, neither typhoid nor tuberculosis is a contagious disease: they are infectious.
• "When Emily was thirteen"… but … "the 17-hour workday" … "contributed 19 poems" – words or digits? There is no rule about this: some use words up to ten and digits from 11 onwards; others use words up to twenty; others (me included) use words up to a hundred, but whichever you prefer you should, I suggest, be consistent
• "some friends of the family, the Jenkins, had promised" – the Jenkins family collectively are "the Jenkinses" – as in "keeping up with the Joneses".
• "channeled" – this American variant of "chanelled" would be better in the normal English form.
• "Aylott & Jones, based at 8, Paternoster Row" – do we need to know the firm's address?
• "Following Charlotte's unsuccessful ….Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey" – this sentence is nearly a hundred words long and could do with splitting in two.
• "Contextualizes", "cauterized", "fictionalized" but "recognised" – I commend Sir Ernest Gowers's advice from Plain Words: the British writer has the advantage over the American that we may, if we wish, use an s all the time, for that will never be wrong, whereas z sometimes will be.
• "sources are in disagreement" – rather a long-winded way of saying "disagree"
• "Biographer Claire Harman" … "biographer Katherine Frank" … "graphic novelist Isabel Greenberg" … "singer-songwriter Cliff Richard, "Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo" – horribly clunky false titles: a definite article before each will remove the clunk.
• "unsanitary conditions at home" – as above
• Music section: I'm surprised to see the omission of the opera Wuthering Heights by the composer Bernard Herrmann (of Psycho fame). It was not staged in Herrmann's lifetime (on account of its excessive length) but he conducted a recording of it in 1966 with Morag Beaton as Cathy.
• Something has gone awry with citation 98

I hope these suggestions are helpful. Over to you. – Tim riley talk 09:59, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for these careful and detailed notes, Tim. I'll get onto this.ArthurTheGardener (talk) 08:40, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

Are we progressing? I don't want to fail the GAN but we need some evidence on this page that my concerns are being addressed. Tim riley talk 19:53, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Hi Tim riley, I think I’ve addressed most of your points, barring a few reference formatting inconsistencies that I haven’t had the chance to address yet. However, I appreciate your time, and I’d be interested to know how far the article needs to reach GA status at this stage. ArthurTheGardener (talk) 22:30, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

I think you've done much of what was needed, to the extent that I feel confident in promoting the article to GA. It is plainly of high quality and has the potential to go to FAC, in my view.

Overall summary

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it reasonably well written?

   A. Prose quality:

   B. MoS compliance for lead, layout, words to watch, fiction, and lists:

2. Is it factually accurate and verifiable?

   A. References to sources:

   Well referenced.

   B. Citation of reliable sources where necessary:

   Well referenced.

   C. No original research:

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. Major aspects:

   B. Focused:

4. Is it neutral?

   Fair representation without bias:

5. Is it stable?

   No edit wars, etc:

6. Does it contain images to illustrate the topic?

   A. Images are copyright tagged, and non-free images have fair use rationales:

   Well illustrated.

   B. Images are provided where possible and appropriate, with suitable captions:

   Well illustrated.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail: