Emily Brontë - biography

Emily Brontë - biography

Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818 at Thornton in Yorkshire, England, to Patrick Brontë and Maria
Branwell. Two years later the family moved to a parsonage near the moors in Haworth, near Keighley,
Yorkshire, where she spent most of her life. Here Emily's father was perpetual curate, and it was in these
surroundings that their literary talent flourished.

Emily was the fifth of six children born into this literary family. Emily and her sisters (except Anne)
attended Cowan Bridge School, a Church of England clergymen's daughters' boarding school (the
original of Lowood in Charlotte's Jane Eyre). Emily spent a total of just six months there. The eldest
sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, became so ill that they had to be taken home, and died shortly after their
return, the former on May 6, and the latter on June 15, 1825. From then until 1830 the surviving children
remained at Haworth.

Emily's mother Maria had died three years after giving birth to Emily on September 15, 1821. As an
escape from these hardships, the remainder of the family – father Patrick, and siblings Charlotte, Anne,
Emily and Branwell, wrote their own stories and delved into the land of fantasy. They created imaginary
lands (Angria, Gondal, Gaaldine), which were featured in stories they wrote. Little of Emily's work from
this period survived, except for poems spoken by characters.

They were all educated and encouraged to read and write by their father, who was born into a poor Irish
family and worked his way up in the Anglican Church. The girls' real education was at the Haworth
parsonage, where they had the run of their father's books, and were thus nurtured on the Bible, Homer,
Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Sir Walter Scott and many others. They enthusiastically read articles
on current affairs, lengthy reviews and intellectual disputes in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and The
Edinburgh Review.

Patrick Brontë's family in Ireland was illiterate; therefore, he prized learning and the power it had to
change lives. Only a poor minister, he knew his daughters would likely have to work as teachers or
governesses, and their education would be indispensable.

From July to October 1835 Emily taught at Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head, where Charlotte had
taught in 1831-32. In the second half of the year 1838, Emily commenced work as a governess at Miss
Patchett's Ladies Academy at Law Hill Hall, near Halifax. In 1842 Emily accompanied her surviving
sisters, Anne and Charlotte, to Brussels, where from mid-February through the beginning of November
they attended the Pensionnat Héger with the goal of improving their proficiency in French in order to start
their own school. Their 1844 plans for their own school, however, foundered because there was no
interest, and the sisters were reunited at Haworth in August 1845.

Though she studied away from home several times, Emily hated being away from Haworth, and she
disliked the loss of privacy and writing time. She preferred to be at home, and she helped around the
house, caring for father, and doing the finances and housework. In 1824, she and her sister Anne tried to
start a school in their home, but there was no interest.

Emily was the most reserved and least social of the Brontë children. Intensely private, she was infuriated
when Charlotte read her poetry notebook and suggested she publish it. She normally did not show her
writings to anyone. She liked to tell stories, though, and she and her little sister Anne invented Gondal,
an imaginary kingdom. Emily never tired of creating stories about the land of Gondal and its inhabitants.

The isolation of Haworth meant for Brontë not frustration as for her sister, but the freedom of the open
moors. Here she experienced the world in terms of elemental forces outside of conventional categories
of good and evil. Her vision was essentially mystical, rooted in the experience of a supernatural power,
which she expressed in poems such as "To Imagination", "The Prisoner", "The Visionary", "The Old
Stoic" and "No Coward Soul". Brontë was influenced by other writers, but also forged her own path. She
explored the dark areas of the soul with her unique vision.
When in the autumn of 1845 Charlotte accidentally discovered the manuscript of Emily's Gondal verses,
she initiated the publication of a volume of poems by all three sisters. So it was the discovery of Emily's
poetic talent that led her, Charlotte and Anne, to publish a joint collection of their poetry in 1846. To
evade contemporary prejudice against female writers, the Brontë sisters adopted androgynous first
names. All three retained the first letter of their first names: Charlotte became Currer Bell, Anne became
Acton Bell, and Emily became Ellis Bell. There was no reaction, but they decided to try writing novels.
Their real identities remained secret until after Emily and Anne had died, when Charlotte at last revealed
the truth of their novels’ authorship.

In 1847, a publisher accepted books by two of the sisters. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was already published,
and receiving rave reviews. Emily published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as two volumes of a
three volume set (the last volume being Agnes Grey by her sister Anne).

Wuthering Heights (1847), set in the moors, it is the story of the effect of a foundling named Heathcliff on
two neighboring families. Loving and hating with elemental intensity, he impinges on the conventions of
civilization with demonic power. Although it received mixed reviews when it first came out, the book
subsequently became an English literary classic. In 1850, Charlotte edited and published Wuthering
Heights as a stand-alone novel and under Emily's real name.

Its innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics. Critics found Wuthering Heights to be intense and
original. But they were also troubled by what they saw as moral ambiguity. They did not think the villains
of the story were adequately punished. After the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847, Emily wrote
little. She wanted nothing do with publishing and fame, and was not even interested in making a trip to
London to affirm that it was she and not Charlotte who wrote Wuthering Heights.

The pseudonym from Wuthering Heights was not removed until after Emily's death in 1848. Branwell had
died months before Emily, and Anne died the following year. The only child remaining, Charlotte,
published a new version of Wuthering Heights in 1850, correcting the mistakes the first publisher had
ignored.

Like her sisters, Emily's health had been weakened by the harsh local climate at home and at school.
She caught a chill during the funeral of her brother in September, and, having refused all medical help,
died on December 19, 1848 of tuberculosis at the age of thirty. She was interred in the Church of St.
Michael and All Angels family vault, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.