Emily Bronte Biography and List of Works

Perhaps the greatest writer of the three Brontë sisters - Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Emily Brontë published only one novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847), a story of doomed love. The sisters also published jointly a volume of verse, POEMS BY CURRER, ELLIS AND ACTON BELL, but only two copies of the book were sold.

'Heatcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.
"I wish I could hold you," she continued bitterly, "till we were both death! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them! Will you say so, Heathcliff?"
"Don't torture me till I am as mad as yourself," cried he, wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth."'
(from Wuthering Heights)

Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Her father was the rector of Hawort from 1820. After their mother died in 1821, the children spent most of their time reading and composing. To escape their unhappy childhood, Anne, Emily, Charlotte and their brother Branwell created imaginary worlds - perhaps inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Emily and Anne created their own Gondal saga, and Bramwell and Charlotte recorded their stories about the kingdom of Angria in minute notebooks. Between the years 1824 and 1825 Emily attended the school at Cowan Bridge with Charlotte, and then was largely educated at home. Her father's bookshelf offered a variety of reading: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott and many others. The children also read articles on current affairs and intellectual disputes in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, and Edinburgh Review.

"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere!
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear."
(January 2, 1946)

In 1835 Emily Brontë was at Roe Head, but suffered from homesickness, and returned, after only a few months, to the moorland scenery of home. In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. In order to facilitate their plan of running a school for girls, Emily and Charlotte travelled, in 1842, to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned the same year to Haworth, where she stayed for the rest of her brief life.

"In secret pleasure, secret tears,
This changeful life has slipped away,
As friendless after eighteen years,
As lone as on my natal day."
(17th May 1837)

Unlike Charlotte, Emily had no close friends. She wrote a few letters and was interested in mysticism. Her first novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), did not gain the immediate success of Charlotte's Jane Eyre, but it has subsequently been acclaimed as one of the finest novels written in the English language. In contrast to Charlotte and Anne, whose novels take the form of autobiographies written by authoritative and reliable narrators, Emily introduces an unreliable narrator, Lockwood. He constantly misinterprets the reactions and interactions of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. More reliable is Nelly Dean, his housekeeper, who has lived for two generations with the novel's two principal families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons.

"Sleep not, dream not; this bright day
Will not, cannot last for aye;
Bliss like thine is bought by years
Dark with torment and with tears."
(from Sleep not, 1846)

Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in late 1848. She had caught a cold at her brother Branwell's funeral in September. After the publication of Wuthering Heighs, some sceptics maintained that the book was written by Branwell, on the grounds that no woman from such a circumscribed life, could have written such a passionate story. In 1848 Charlotte and Anne visited George Smith to reveal their identity and to help quell rumors that a single author lay behind the pseudonyms. After her sisters' deaths, Charlotte edited a second edition of their novels, with prefatory commentary aimed at correcting what she saw as the reviewers' misunderstanding of Wuthering Heights. The complex time scheme of the novel had been taken as evidence by the critics, that Emily had not achieved full formal control over her narrative materials. However, her model in layering narrative within narrative may have been Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Emily's refusal to reduce ambiguity to simplistic clarity did not have any immediate influence on the novel form until Wilkie Collins experimented with multi-voiced first-person narratives in such works as The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).

Wuthering Heights (1847) - the story is narrated by Lockwood, a gentleman visiting the Yorkshire moors in which the novel is set, and Mrs Dean, housekeeper to the Earnshaw family, who had been witness to the interlocked destinies of the original owners of the Heights. In a series of flashbacks and time shifts, Brontë draws a powerful picture of the enigmatic Heathcliff, who is brought to Heights from the streets of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw. Heathcliff is treated in the same fashion as Earnshaw's own children, Cathrine and Hindley. After his death Heathcliff is bullied by Hindley, who loves Catherine, but she marries Edgar Linton. Heathcliff 's destructive force is unleashed, and his first victim is Catherine, who dies giving birth to a girl, another Catherine. Isabella Linton, Edgar's sister, whom he had married, flees to the south. Their son Linton and Catherine are married, but the always sickly Linton dies. Hareton, Hindley's son, and the young widow became close. Increasingly isolated and alienated from daily life, Heathcliff experiences visions, and he longs for the death that will reunite him with Catherine.

For further reading: The Brontë's Web of Childhood by Fannie Ratchford (1941); The Genesis of Wuthering Heights by Mary Visick (1965); Their Proper Sphere by Inga-Stina Ewbank (1966); The Artist as Free Woman by S. Davies; The Brontës and Their Background by Tom Winnifrith (1973); Myths of Power by Terry Eagleton (1975); The Art of Emily Brontë, ed. by A. Smith (1976); Emily Brontë by Stevie Davies (1988); Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights by U.C. Knoepflmacher (1989); The Brontës by Juliet Barker (1994), Wuthering Heights by Maggie Berg (1996); Critical Essays on Emily Brontë, ed. by Tom Winnifrith (1997); The Birth of Wuthering Heights by E. Chitman (1998); Emily Brontë by S. Vine (1998) - see also biographies by Lyn Pykett (1990) and W. Gérin (1971).

Museums and places to visit: Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Keighley; Brontë Way - a forty mile walk in four section to sites associated with the Brontës; Oakwell Hall County Park, Nutter Lane, Birstall - house features as "Fieldhead" in Charlotte's Shirley; The Red House Museum, Oxford Rd, Gomersal, Cleckheaton - House appears as "Briarmains in Charlotte's Shirley; Wuthering Heights Walk, a six mile walk to Top Withins, the setting for Wuthering Heights.

Patrick Branwell Brontë (1817-1848) - collaborated with Charlotte in creating the imaginary world of Angria. After failing as a painter and writer, he took to drink and opium, worked then as a tutor and assistant clerk to a railway company. In 1842 he was dismissed and joined his sister Anne at Thorp Green Hall as a tutor. His affair with his employer's wife ended disastrously. Patrick Brontë returned to Haworth in 1845, where he rapidly declined and died three years later.

POEMS BY CURRER, ELLIS AND ACTON BELL, (1846)
WUTHERING HEIGHTS, (1847)
LEGENDS OF ANGRIA, (1933)
GONDAL'S QUEEN, (1955)