Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë: One Book, and No Apology

In 1846 three sisters paid to publish a volume of their own poems under male pseudonyms. It sold two copies. The following year one of them brought out a novel that reviewers called "coarse and loathsome," populated by characters a critic judged "utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible." She died thirteen months later at thirty. Four decades after that, G. K. Chesterton described *Wuthering Heights* as a book "written by an eagle," and the twentieth century voted it its favourite nineteenth-century novel. Almost nothing about Emily Brontë's career made sense at the time.

The Parsonage and the Graveyard

Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish curate, and Maria Branwell, the daughter of a Penzance merchant. Her mother died on 15 September 1821, when Emily was three. In 1825 her sisters Maria and Elizabeth died after contracting typhoid at Cowan Bridge School, an institution notorious for poor and insufficient food, unsanitary conditions, harsh discipline and repeated outbreaks of infectious disease.

What remained was Haworth: a moorland parsonage, a widowed father, and four surviving children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne — of whom Emily was closest to the youngest. After Cowan Bridge she was educated largely at home by her father. The household was isolated, bookish, and organised around a graveyard.

Gondal

Out of that isolation came something extraordinary. The Brontë children invented entire fictional countries and administered them for years. Emily and Anne built Gondal, a complex imaginary island with its own dynasties, wars and betrayals, and Emily kept working inside it for most of her life, writing poems and prose set in its territory. She was not, in other words, a woman who wrote one novel out of nowhere. She was a writer who had been running a private literature for two decades before anyone else read a line of it.

Roe Head, Law Hill, Brussels

The attempts to place her in the world went badly. At seventeen she went to Roe Head Girls' School and lasted a few months before homesickness drove her back. In 1838–39 she taught at Law Hill School, where the working day ran to seventeen hours. In 1842–43 she and Charlotte studied at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels.

That last episode produced the single most valuable outside testimony about her. Constantin Heger, who taught both sisters, rated Emily's intellect as something even higher than Charlotte's, and identified the qualities precisely: a powerful reason, and a strong, imperious will. He was describing a mind, not a temperament — a distinction most later commentators have failed to make.

Two Copies

In February 1844 Emily began copying her poems into notebooks. In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte found them and, against her sister's wishes, insisted they be published. Charlotte's own description of what she had found remains the best one: they had "a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating."

The sisters adopted masculine pseudonyms to sidestep the prejudice against women writers. Emily became Ellis Bell. *Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell* appeared in 1846 at their own expense, with twenty-one poems by Emily among the more than two hundred she wrote in her life. It sold two copies. One reader was impressed enough to write asking for their autographs.

Wuthering Heights

The novel came out in December 1847, published by Thomas Cautley Newby under the Ellis Bell name. It grew directly out of Gondal — the same moorland settings, the same ferocious family conflict — and it baffled its first readers. The violence and passion were considered indecent; the structure, with its nested narrators and doubled generations, was unlike anything Victorian reviewers had a template for. Most of them assumed a man had written it, which tells you what they made of its restraint.

Emily began a second novel. After her death, Charlotte destroyed it.

The Nineteenth of December

Branwell died on 24 September 1848, probably of tuberculosis. Emily caught a severe cold at his funeral; it became an inflammation of the lungs. She refused treatment throughout, declaring that she would have "no poisoning doctor" near her, and went on with the household routine while she deteriorated. She died on 19 December 1848, at about two in the afternoon, aged thirty. Charlotte recorded her last audible words, spoken too late: "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now."

Why Emily Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a specific and unusual capacity: moral neutrality at full imaginative intensity. *Wuthering Heights* refuses to arbitrate between its characters. Heathcliff is not condemned, Catherine is not excused, and the book offers the reader no vantage point from which to feel comfortable — which is exactly why 1847 recoiled and why it has never dated. The technical apparatus that delivers this, the unreliable double narration, was decades ahead of its use elsewhere. Heger, who had no reason to flatter her, named the underlying faculty as a powerful reason joined to an imperious will. Chesterton's verdict that the novel was "written by an eagle" was part of the rehabilitation of the 1880s, when Swinburne and Matthew Arnold also took up her cause after four decades of obscurity.

The honest counter-case begins with the evidence. Emily left one completed novel, roughly two hundred poems, and almost no self-explanation; the second novel was burned. Nearly everything we think we know about her personality comes through Charlotte, whose 1850 preface cast her as "a native and nursling of the moors" who "did not know what she had done" — a portrait modern scholars regard as a deliberate softening, in which Charlotte reshaped her sister's character, history and even some of her poems to make her palatable. That leaves the genius claim resting on a single book by a writer we cannot cross-examine, with no arc of development to point to and no maturity to judge her against. The Victorians who found the novel repellent were not simply wrong about what it does; they were reacting accurately to a book designed to withhold consolation. Whether that constitutes genius or a single, unrepeatable act of nerve is a question the surviving evidence cannot close.

Legacy

*Wuthering Heights* went from obscurity to the centre of the English canon in the space of a generation and has stayed there, endlessly filmed, adapted and argued about. The poems have travelled too: "No coward soul is mine," a line from a woman who refused a doctor and finished her book anyway, now turns up on mugs, on key rings, and as a tattoo. Emily Brontë published under a man's name, sold two copies, and outlasted every reviewer who buried her.

Achievements

• Notable work: Wuthering Heights
• Notable work: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
• Genres: fiction and poetry