Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë was an English writer born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, near Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. She was the fifth of six Brontë children, four of whom survived into adulthood. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth, a small Pennine village where her father, Patrick Brontë, worked as perpetual curate. Her mother, Maria Branwell, died when Emily was three, and her aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, stayed in the household to help care for the children.

Brontë is best known for Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. At the time, it was not generally admired, and many critics thought its characters coarse and immoral. The novel later came to be considered a classic of English literature. She also co-authored Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, using the same male-sounding Bell surname that concealed their identities as women writers.

Her education was shaped by both loss and closeness. In 1824 Emily and her three elder sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where the children suffered poor food, unsanitary conditions, harsh discipline, and infectious disease. After her sisters Maria and Elizabeth fell ill and died of tuberculosis in 1825, Charlotte and Emily were brought back to Haworth. Apart from brief intervals at school, Emily was mostly taught at home by her father and cared for by her aunt and the family servant, Tabby Ackroyd.

At home, the Brontë children were encouraged to read, write, and take an interest in politics and current affairs. Patrick Brontë had a large personal library and allowed his children to use it, while Branwell borrowed books and shared them with his sisters. Emily and her siblings read books, magazines, and periodicals, and were also taught drawing, painting, Latin, and Classics. A piano bought by Patrick in 1833 or 1834 became another part of Emily’s life, and she became proficient at playing it.

The siblings were unusually close, especially Emily and Anne, who were described by family friend Ellen Nussey as being “like twins.” Together they wrote books and journals set in imaginary worlds called Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal. Charlotte later described Emily as solitary, strong-willed, and nonconforming, with a keen love of nature and animals. Apart from a short period in Brussels with Charlotte as a student and teacher, Emily spent most of her life at home in Haworth, helping with chores, playing the piano, and teaching herself from books.

Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848, aged 30, only a year after Wuthering Heights appeared. Her life was short and largely domestic, but her writing came from a mind trained by reading, isolation, family invention, and a fierce independence of spirit. The force of her work still holds readers because it refuses softness where she saw hardness, and because it gives emotional life a wildness that feels direct, difficult, and alive.