🇬🇧Emily
Brontë

She wrote in secret. From early adolescence, Emily Brontë filled notebooks with poetry that she kept hidden from everyone — notebooks that her sister Charlotte discovered by accident in 1845, when Emily was twenty-six, and which revealed a talent that Charlotte immediately recognized as extraordinary. The discovery prompted all three Brontë sisters to publish a joint poetry collection under male pseudonyms; it also apparently convinced Emily to write the novel she had been imagining for years. That novel, completed when she was twenty-eight and published in December 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, was Wuthering Heights — one of the most violent, passionate, formally innovative, and psychologically penetrating works of fiction in the English language. She died of tuberculosis less than a year after it was published, never knowing whether posterity would remember her. Posterity has not forgotten.

Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Bradford, the fifth of six children of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria. When Emily was two, the family moved to Haworth, a bleak village on the Yorkshire moors, where Patrick Brontë served as perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church. Their mother died of cancer in 1821. Two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died of tuberculosis in 1825 after being sent to Cowan Bridge school. Emily and her remaining siblings — Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne — were educated largely at home and left to roam the moors, which became their imaginative landscape and, for Emily, something close to a religion. The wildness and extremity of the moors — their violence in winter, their beauty in summer, their indifference to human feeling — is everywhere in her writing.

From around age thirteen, Emily and Anne Brontë created and wrote obsessively about an imaginary world called Gondal — a fictional island kingdom with a complex political history, passionate characters, and a continuous narrative that Emily maintained in poetry and prose throughout her life. Almost all of Emily's surviving poetry is rooted in the Gondal mythology. The poems are remarkable: metrically varied, emotionally fierce, concerned with death, nature, freedom, and what Emily called "the God within my breast" — an immanent spiritual force utterly at odds with the conventional Christianity of her father's church. When Charlotte discovered these poems and showed them to a publisher, twenty-one of Emily's poems were included in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846). The collection sold two copies.

While the poetry collection was failing commercially, Emily was writing Wuthering Heights. She had apparently begun planning or drafting it before 1845; the manuscript was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1847 and published in December of that year, with Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Anne's Agnes Grey, all by the three Bell brothers. The novel's initial reception was mixed. Many reviewers found it brutal, coarse, and morally indefensible. Some recognized it as a work of savage originality. The story of Heathcliff — the foundling of unknown origins who returns after years of mysterious absence to destroy, with meticulous cruelty, the families who humiliated him — and his relationship with Catherine Earnshaw was unlike anything in the Victorian novel: it depicted passion not as sentiment but as obsession, not as social aspiration but as something closer to metaphysics, a love that persisted beyond death as a literal haunting of the landscape.

Emily Brontë died on December 19, 1848, of tuberculosis, aged thirty. Her brother Branwell had died in September; it is thought that she contracted the infection at his funeral. She refused medical attention. Charlotte described her dying with characteristic stubbornness — refusing to lie in bed until the morning of her death, insisting on feeding the dogs, sewing. She died on the sofa. She had never left England, had rarely left Yorkshire, had spent most of her life within walking distance of the Haworth parsonage and the moors beyond it. She had published one collection of poems that almost nobody read and one novel that everybody eventually read. It was enough.

The rehabilitation of Wuthering Heights as a masterpiece was gradual but thorough. By the twentieth century it was considered one of the greatest novels in English, taught in universities worldwide, adapted for film and stage repeatedly, and read by each new generation as a fresh discovery. Its influence on subsequent fiction — particularly on narratives of obsessive passion and psychological extremity — has been vast. Her poetry, too, has been steadily rediscovered: several of her poems, particularly "No Coward Soul Is Mine," are now counted among the finest in the Victorian canon. Charlotte wrote of her dead sister: "stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone." It was, as tributes go, accurate.