On the surface, Emily is a cute name, a little name. Like Molly, it has that -ly ending that makes it sound sweet, childlike, pixieish. And when I picture an Emily, she is cute. She wears the aforementioned pigtails — she may even be able to pull them off past the age of 18. She's got freckles, and she probably owns a pair of Mary Janes. But beneath her adorable exterior lurks evil. It's not a bitchy, mean-girl type of evil, though. It's an evil that can be kind of awesome — as long as you're not on the wrong side of it.

Part of my evil-Emily idea may come from literary Emilies who were not what they seemed. Reclusive, supposedly virginal Emily Dickinson may not have been so chaste after all — and her poems about "wild nights" and volcanoes certainly weren't. Emily Brontë also never married and was, at least according to Anne Carson, antisocial and awkward. But she wrote the best — and the scariest — book of her whole literary family. Then there's Emily the Strange, who with her trademark Mary Janes and inscrutable gaze is clearly capable of dark things — including stealing the identity of a certain Nate the Great character.

Hollywood Emilies Blunt and Watson tend to play characters with an edge, and though Emily Mortimer often plays sweet, her face and voice have some mischief in them. In fact, she might be the best person to play my image of the quintessential Emily — someone underestimated because of her cuteness who is more than capable of cutting a bitch, perhaps in an ingenious and underhanded way. This Emily is a good friend to have, especially if your life sometimes called for someone devious. But she's a dangerous enemy. Her name actually means "rival" — watch out if she's yours.

Emily [Wikipedia]

Apparently undeterred by the creepiness and tragedy of Emily Brontë's love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff (who at one point hangs another girl's dog), Twilight author Stephenie Meyer even has Bella quote Brontë at one point to describe her feelings for Edward. Taking Wuthering Heights as a model for your love is a little like walking down the aisle, to, say, "Heart-Shaped Box," but that doesn't seem to bother Twihards. They're gobbling up a new edition of the book, complete with a very Twilighty cover and the tagline "love never dies." However, some readers are annoyed with the content. One reviewer wrote on the publisher's website,

I was really disappointed when reading this book, it's made to believe to be one of the greatest love stories ever told and I found only five pages out of the whole book about there love and the rest filled with bitterness and pain and other peoples stories.

People were such downers in 1847. Also, they talked funny. Another reviewer asked if the book was "in old english or mordern understandable english?" Public service message: people stopped speaking Old English in the 12th century. Still, classics like Wuthering Heights may seem inaccessible to "mordern" readers. What better way to make them new again than to have today's books endorse them? And why stop with Twilight? We thought of a few more glossy bestsellers that could be shilling dusty tomes:

How Not To Look Old: The Picture Of Dorian Grey
Harry Potter: David Copperfield
Eat This, Not That!: Alice in Wonderland
Jim Cramer's Mad Money: The Grapes Of Wrath
Confessions of a Shopaholic: Madame Bovary
Bob Greene's Total Body Makeover: The Metamorphosis
The Berenstein Bears: The Bear
What Not To Wear: The Scarlet Letter
Anything by Rush Limbaugh: Heart of Darkness
Eat, Pray, Love: Titus Andronicus
Lauren Conrad's LA Candy: The Portrait of a Lady

We're sure you can think of more.

Vampire Endorsement Turns Brontë Into Bestseller [Guardian]

Earlier: Heathcliff Didn't Sparkle, Though

Marianne Dashwood, Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility:
Symptoms: "swooning and not eating," "life threatening fever...caused...[by] tripping through wet grass," "putrid tendency"
The doc says: "typhus" and "streptococcal sore throat, followed by septicaemia"
We say: Girl was just being one of those bitches we hate who say their whole lives are over because a boy who they never even had a real relationship with dumped her. And whatever, she moved on from Willoughby to that old Colonel in like no time at all. Just needs to pull it together.

Cathy Earnshaw, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights:
Symptoms: "dies in childbirth (having starved herself) and then proceeds to haunt everyone"
The doc says: "The one thing that everyone knows about the Bronte family is that there was a virtual holocaust of TB among them."
We say: Um, TB doesn't make you die in childbirth. Nor does it make you into a ghost. Cathy luvs Heathcliff 4eva!

Lady Honoria Dedlock, Charles Dickens' Bleak House:
Symptoms: "Lady Dedlock too dies of smallpox, coincidentally after having walked from London to St Albans, having picked up some "deadly stains" on her bustle whilst rambling in a graveyard the best part of two years earlier."
The doc says: "The incubation period for smallpox is however a matter of days...She can't have died of a 20 mile walk, even if her shoes did get sodden."
We say: This is the one book we skipped and lied our way through when we took 19th century European lit in college. Our professor was really mean and we though this book seemed boring. Sorry, Dickens. We have no idea why this lady died.

Why Heroines Die In Classic Fiction [BBC]