Emily Brontë

Life

Emily Jane Brontë was born in 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of the six Brontë children, and grew up at the parsonage in Haworth after her father became curate there. Her mother died when she was three. She spent a few months at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where her two eldest sisters fell fatally ill, and was then educated at home. With her sister Anne she created an imaginary world called Gondal, about which she wrote poems for the rest of her life.

Emily left Haworth rarely and unwillingly. A term at a school in Yorkshire as a pupil, a few months as a teacher at a school near Halifax, and most of a year in Brussels in 1842 studying with Charlotte were her only extended absences, and each time she returned home. At the parsonage she managed the household, walked on the moors, and kept writing. In 1846 her poems appeared alongside her sisters’ in a volume published under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and in December 1847 her only novel, Wuthering Heights, was published as the work of Ellis Bell.

She fell ill in the autumn of 1848, soon after her brother Branwell’s death, refused medical help, and died of tuberculosis in December of that year, at thirty. She never knew how her novel would come to be regarded.

Literary significance

Wuthering Heights was received uneasily on publication; reviewers recognized its power and were disturbed by its violence. Its reputation grew through the nineteenth century, and it is now generally ranked among the major English novels, admired for its structure, its moorland setting, and its refusal to soften any of its characters. Emily Brontë is also considered one of the best English poets of her period, though her verse is less widely read than her novel. Because she left no diary or correspondence of any length, much of what is said about her is inference, and she remains the least known of the three sisters.

Where to start

Wuthering Heights is the whole of her fiction. Readers who find it strange may want to read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre first, for a more conventional way into the family’s work.