Emily Bronte

Emily Jane Bronte was born on July 30, 1818, in the village of Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of Patrick Bronte, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, and his Cornish wife Maria Branwell ^[1]. In 1820 the family moved a few miles to Haworth, where Patrick had been appointed perpetual curate. The parsonage there, a stone house at the top of a steep village street with the church on one side and open moorland behind, became the setting for almost the whole of Emily's life ^[2].

Loss arrived early and repeatedly. Her mother died of cancer in 1821, when Emily was three, and her aunt Elizabeth Branwell came from Penzance to help run the household ^[1]. In 1824 Emily briefly joined her older sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, an institution whose harsh conditions Charlotte later drew on for Lowood in Jane Eyre. Maria and Elizabeth both fell ill there and died of tuberculosis in 1825, after which Patrick withdrew Charlotte and Emily and educated the surviving children largely at home ^[3].

Home education suited Emily. The parsonage held books, newspapers, and periodicals, and Patrick encouraged wide reading and free discussion. The four remaining siblings, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, invented elaborate imaginary worlds and wrote about them in tiny hand-made books. Around 1831 Emily and Anne broke away from the Glass Town and Angria sagas dominated by the older two and created Gondal, an island kingdom of warring queens, prisoners, and exiles that Emily continued to write about into adulthood ^[4]. Much of her surviving poetry began as Gondal verse, and any account of Emily Bronte facts has to start with this long private apprenticeship in fiction.

Emily's few attempts to live away from Haworth were short and unhappy. In 1835 she enrolled at Roe Head school, where Charlotte was teaching, but her health broke down within about three months and she returned home; Charlotte later wrote that her sister withered when separated from the moors ^[3]. In 1838 Emily took a teaching post at Law Hill school near Halifax, an exhausting position she held for roughly six months before again coming back to the parsonage ^[2].

The longest absence came in 1842, when Emily and Charlotte traveled to Brussels to study languages at the Pensionnat Heger, hoping to qualify themselves to open a school of their own. The school's proprietor, Constantin Heger, later recalled Emily's powerful, logical mind, remarking that she reasoned with unusual tenacity for a woman of her time, but she made few friends and remained aloof ^[1]. The sisters returned to Haworth in November 1842 after the death of their aunt, and Emily never left Yorkshire again. She managed the household, baked bread, studied German at the kitchen table, and walked the moors with her mastiff, Keeper ^[2].

The turn toward publication came by accident. In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte found one of Emily's manuscript notebooks of poems and was struck by their condensed, vigorous quality. Emily was furious at the intrusion into her privacy, and it took days of persuasion, along with Anne producing verses of her own, before she agreed to a joint venture ^[3]. In 1846 the three sisters paid the London firm of Aylott and Jones to publish Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, adopting ambiguous pseudonyms to avoid the condescension routinely directed at women writers. The volume sold only two copies, but reviewers singled out the poems of Ellis Bell, Emily's alias, for their music and originality ^[4].

Chief among Emily Bronte achievements is Wuthering Heights, her only novel, published in December 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby as the first two volumes of a three-volume set completed by Anne's Agnes Grey ^[1]. The book tells the entwined stories of two households on the Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, across two generations, centering on the foundling Heathcliff and his consuming bond with Catherine Earnshaw. Its structure was daring for the period: the narrative arrives filtered through two unreliable narrators, the visiting tenant Lockwood and the housekeeper Nelly Dean, and moves backward and forward across some thirty years ^[5].

Early reviews registered shock. Critics acknowledged the book's power while condemning its brutality; one described it as coarse and disagreeable, and several advised readers to burn it. Confusion over the Bell pseudonyms deepened when Newby hinted that all the Bell novels were the work of one author, a misrepresentation that eventually forced Charlotte and Anne to reveal their identities to Charlotte's publisher in London in 1848, a trip Emily refused to join ^[3]. Emily earned little from the novel in her lifetime and saw none of its later fame.

Her poetry forms the second pillar of her reputation. Poems such as No Coward Soul Is Mine, Remembrance, and The Prisoner combine plain diction with metaphysical reach, and later critics have ranked her among the finest English lyric poets of the nineteenth century ^[4]. About two hundred of her poems survive, many originating in the Gondal saga, and scholars continue to debate which were personal utterances and which belonged to her invented world ^[6].

Emily was, by every surviving account, the most reserved of the Brontes. She formed almost no attachments outside her family, rarely spoke to strangers, and left behind no diary of substance, only a handful of letters, a few birthday notes exchanged with Anne, and her manuscripts ^[2]. What is known of her character comes largely through Charlotte, who described a sister stronger than a man and simpler than a child, and through the recollections of household servants and the few outsiders who met her ^[3].

She was deeply attached to animals and to the landscape around Haworth. Stories preserved in early biographies describe her separating fighting dogs with her bare hands and cauterizing her own arm with a hot iron after being bitten by a possibly rabid dog, telling no one until the danger had passed ^[1]. Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and first biographer, recorded several such accounts, though modern scholars treat some of the more dramatic anecdotes with caution, since so little firsthand evidence about Emily exists ^[7].

No record survives of any romantic relationship. Her surviving papers show instead a mind occupied with practical housekeeping, music (she was the family's best pianist), German literature, and the ongoing Gondal chronicles she shared with Anne well into her twenties ^[6]. The gap between the quiet domestic figure and the ferocity of Wuthering Heights has fascinated readers since the novel appeared, and it remains one of the central puzzles in any Emily Bronte biography.

The final year of Emily's life was shadowed by her brother's decline. Branwell Bronte, whose talents had dissolved into alcohol and opium addiction after a failed career and a disastrous love affair, died on September 24, 1848, most likely of tuberculosis aggravated by his habits ^[1]. Emily caught a severe cold at his funeral service, and her condition worsened through the autumn into what was then called consumption.

She refused nearly all medical help, declining to see what she called a poisoning doctor and insisting on continuing her household routine even as she grew emaciated and struggled to breathe. Charlotte's letters from these weeks record her mounting anguish at a sister who would accept no remedy and admit no weakness ^[3]. Only on the morning of December 19, 1848, did Emily finally say that a doctor might be sent for. She died that afternoon on the parsonage sofa, aged thirty, and was buried in the family vault beneath the church of St Michael and All Angels in Haworth ^[2]. Anne, already ill with the same disease, died the following May.

Whether Emily had begun a second novel is uncertain. A letter from Newby in early 1848 appears to refer to a new work in progress by Ellis Bell, but no manuscript has ever been found, and some scholars suspect Charlotte destroyed unfinished papers after her sister's death to protect her memory ^[6].

Recognition came slowly, then completely. In 1850 Charlotte edited a second edition of Wuthering Heights, smoothing the dialect, adding a selection of Emily's poems, and supplying a biographical notice that revealed the sisters behind the Bell pseudonyms and defended Emily's novel as the natural product of a secluded genius ^[3]. Victorian opinion warmed gradually; by the early twentieth century critics such as Virginia Woolf were treating Wuthering Heights as a rarer achievement than Jane Eyre, a book that attempted to speak, as Woolf put it, through its characters about the nature of the world itself ^[5].

The novel has since become a fixture of school and university curricula and has never gone out of print. It has been adapted repeatedly for other media, from William Wyler's 1939 Hollywood film with Laurence Olivier to Kate Bush's 1978 song Wuthering Heights, which reached number one on the UK singles chart, along with operas, ballets, and numerous television versions ^[8]. Heathcliff and Catherine have passed into the general culture as shorthand for destructive, obsessive love, though many critics argue the book is better read as an anatomy of cruelty and inheritance than as a romance ^[5].

Haworth Parsonage, now the Bronte Parsonage Museum run by the Bronte Society (founded in 1893, one of the oldest literary societies in the English-speaking world), draws visitors from around the globe, and the surrounding moorland is signposted as Bronte Country ^[2]. Among the durable Emily Bronte facts is this: a woman who published one novel and twenty-one poems in her lifetime, under a name not her own, now holds a permanent place in world literature. Her bicentenary in 2018 was marked by exhibitions, new editions, and commissions across Britain, confirming that the most private of the Brontes has become the most argued over ^[8].