Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë (Thornton, 1818 – Haworth, 1848) was an English writer whose work belongs to the Romantic tradition and to the Victorian age. She lived only thirty years and published a single novel, yet that book has become one of the central works of English literature, and her poems are now highly regarded by critics.

She was the fifth of six children. Her mother died in 1821, and soon afterwards the family moved to Haworth, in Yorkshire, where her father worked as an Anglican clergyman. After a brief and harsh stay at the Cowan Bridge school, where her elder sisters fell ill with tuberculosis, Emily was educated mostly at home, largely under her father's guidance. As children, she and her siblings invented imaginary worlds such as Angria and Gondal and wrote stories and poems about them. Later she worked as a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, until her aunt's death brought her back to England. From then on she managed the household and, in her last years, looked after her brother Branwell, whose addictions to alcohol and opium grew severe. It is thought that many of her poems and pages of her novel were written during the long nights she spent waiting up for him to come home.

In 1846 the three sisters published a joint volume of poems under masculine names, but it sold very few copies. Soon afterwards Emily issued Wuthering Heights, under the name Ellis Bell, a choice that helped her avoid the prejudice women writers faced. The novel surprised readers with its unusual structure and its raw portrayal of violence, passion and family conflict, and many critics of the time found it coarse and even morally troubling. Over the following decades it came to be read as a work of great originality, dealing with cruelty, alcoholism and female independence. Those who knew her described her as private and reserved, a contrast to the emotional force of her writing.

Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged thirty, of tuberculosis, after catching a cold at her brother's funeral. Her reputation grew after her death. Jorge Luis Borges called the novel "extreme and unclassifiable", and it was filmed several times, including by William Wyler in 1939 and by Luis Buñuel as Abismos de pasión in 1953. Today she is remembered as one of the most distinctive voices of nineteenth-century English literature.