Emily Brontë

Born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, Emily Jane Brontë was the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman of Irish origin, and Maria Branwell. The family moved to the parsonage at Haworth in 1820, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, and the mother died the following year. Two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in childhood after contracting tuberculosis at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. The surviving children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, created elaborate imaginary worlds in tiny handmade books: Charlotte and Branwell invented the kingdom of Angria, while Emily and Anne built the rival realm of Gondal, whose saga Emily continued writing into adulthood. She was the most fiercely private of the siblings, intensely attached to the moors and miserable whenever removed from them; her few attempts at school and employment away from Haworth ended in homesickness and physical collapse. In 1846 the three sisters published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, masculine pseudonyms chosen to avoid the prejudice facing women writers, and sold two copies. Wuthering Heights, published in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, received bewildered and often hostile reviews; critics found its depiction of obsessive love, cruelty, and spectral visitation on the Yorkshire moors shocking and coarse. It is now regarded as one of the most original novels in the English language, a work whose narrative complexity and emotional ferocity were decades ahead of their time. Emily caught a cold at her brother Branwell’s funeral in September 1848, refused all medical attention, and died of tuberculosis on December 19, 1848, at the age of thirty. She never knew the reputation her single novel would achieve.