Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best known as the author of Wuthering Heights. [1] A member of the Brontë literary family, she published first as a poet and then, under the pen name Ellis Bell, produced a novel whose violence of feeling and unconventional narrative design initially unsettled reviewers. [2] She died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty, a year after its publication.
Early life and education
Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of the clergyman Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria. [1] In 1820 the family moved to the parsonage at Haworth, the moorland village that shaped the landscape of her writing, and her mother died the following year.
In 1824 Emily was sent with several of her sisters to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, a harsh institution whose conditions were blamed for the illnesses that killed her two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, in 1825. [1] The surviving children were educated largely at home, where Emily and her sister Anne invented the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, a shared chronicle of wars, exiles and doomed monarchs that supplied material for Emily's poetry for the rest of her life. [2]
Work and teaching
Attempts to earn a living outside Haworth were brief and unhappy. Emily taught at Law Hill School near Halifax in the late 1830s, and in 1842 travelled with her sister Charlotte to Brussels to study languages at the Pensionnat run by Constantin and Claire Héger, intending to prepare for the opening of a school of their own. [1] The plan came to nothing, and she returned to the parsonage, where she took on much of the household work while continuing to write.
Poetry and Wuthering Heights
In 1845 Charlotte discovered a manuscript book of Emily's poems and pressed for their publication. The result was Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), a joint volume by the three sisters under deliberately ambiguous pen names. [3] It sold only a handful of copies, but Emily's contributions are now regarded as among the strongest English lyric poetry of the period, marked by a spare diction and an unsentimental view of nature, solitude and death.
Wuthering Heights appeared in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell. [1] Its nested narrators, its refusal to moralise, and the ferocity of the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw disconcerted contemporary critics, several of whom found the book brutal and its characters repellent. [2] Later readers came to regard that same austerity of design as its strength, and the novel's reputation rose steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Death and legacy
Emily Brontë's health failed rapidly after her brother Branwell's funeral in September 1848. She refused medical attention until her final day and died of tuberculosis at Haworth on 19 December 1848, aged thirty. [1] She was buried in the family vault at St Michael and All Angels' Church.
Wuthering Heights has since been adapted repeatedly for film, opera, television and the stage, and is a fixture of literary study in English. [4] The Brontë parsonage at Haworth is preserved as a museum devoted to the family, and Emily's poems are widely anthologised alongside the novel that made her name.
