Emily Jane Brontë (, commonly ; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English writer best known for her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. She also co-authored a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Emily was the fifth of six Brontë siblings, four of whom survived into adulthood. Her mother, Maria Branwell, died when she was three, leaving the children in the care of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Apart from brief intervals at school, Emily was mostly taught at home by her father, Patrick Brontë, who was the curate of Haworth. She was very close to her siblings, especially her younger sister Anne, and together they wrote books and journals depicting imaginary worlds named Glass Town, Angria and Gondal. She was described by her sister Charlotte as solitary, strong-willed and nonconforming, with a keen love of nature and animals.
Apart from a brief period at school, and another as a student and teacher in Brussels with her sister Charlotte, Emily spent most of her life at home in Haworth, helping the family servant with chores, playing the piano and teaching herself from books.
Her work was originally published under the pen name Ellis Bell. It was not generally admired at the time, and many critics felt that the characters in Wuthering Heights were coarse and immoral. In spite of this, the novel is considered a classic of English literature. Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, a year after the novel's publication.
Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to Maria Branwell, the daughter of a wealthy Penzance merchant and property owner, and Patrick Brontë, a curate from an impoverished Irish family. The Brontë family lived in Market Street, in Thornton, a village on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Their house is now open to the public and is known as the Brontë Birthplace.
Emily was the fifth of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Branwell. In 1820, Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Soon after Anne's birth, the family moved 12 miles (19 km) away to the village of Haworth, in the Pennines, where Patrick Brontë took employment as perpetual curate. Haworth was a small community with an unusually high early mortality rate. In 1850, Benjamin Herschel Babbage reported deeply insanitary conditions, including contamination to the village water supply from the overcrowded graveyard nearby. This is believed to have had a serious impact on the health of Emily and her siblings.
On 15 September 1821, Maria Branwell died, after a long illness which her nurse believed to have been uterine cancer. Her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, had joined the household to nurse her, and made the move permanent to care for the three-year-old Emily and her siblings. Elizabeth Branwell was not especially maternal, taking her meals alone, as did Patrick Brontë. She is portrayed as a stern disciplinarian in Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë, but Nick Holland states in his biography of her that she also had an affectionate and supportive side.
In 1824, Emily and her three elder sisters were sent to the newly opened Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At her admission, the school register said of Emily that she "reads very prettily, and works a little". At six years old, she was the youngest student, and the superintendent described her as "quite the pet nursling of the school". The children suffered severe privations at Cowan Bridge, including poor and insufficient food, unsanitary conditions, harsh discipline and frequent outbreaks of infectious disease such as typhoid and tuberculosis. In 1825, following an outbreak of typhoid fever, Maria and Elizabeth both fell ill, and were sent home, where they died of tuberculosis within three months of one other. After this, Charlotte and Emily were brought back to Haworth by their father. The children were subsequently educated at home, and were cared for by their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, who had given up her plans to return to Penzance, and the house servant, Tabby Ackroyd.
The Brontë children were encouraged by their father and aunt to develop their literary talents and to take an interest in politics and current affairs. Girls were not allowed access to the public library, but Branwell borrowed books which he shared with his sisters, and Patrick Brontë had a large personal library, to which he allowed his children access. Thus Emily and her siblings read a wide range of published material, including books, periodicals and magazines. Favourites included: Aesop's Fables, the Arabian Nights, Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather and Blackwood's Magazine, as well as Oliver Goldsmith's A History of England and J. Goldsmith's A Grammar of General Geography. In 1833 or 1834 Patrick Brontë bought a piano, and Emily became proficient in its use. The Brontë children were also tutored in drawing and painting, as well as in Latin and Classics. They were familiar with the work of Thomas Bewick and John Martin, the engravings of William Finden, and illustrations from The Literary Souvenir. Twenty-nine drawings and paintings by Emily are known to have survived, including a watercolour painting of her dog, Keeper.
In spite of his desire for his children to receive as comprehensive an education as possible, Patrick Brontë himself was cold and emotionally distant, and exhibited a number of marked eccentricities, such as carrying a loaded gun at all times and imposing a number of idiosyncratic personal rules on the household. Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte depicts him as prone to violent rages, once cutting up a dress belonging to his wife because he felt it encouraged vanity, and forbidding his children to eat meat in case it made them too dependent on their physical comfort, although Patrick himself denied this, and Gaskell's account is now generally considered to have been an exaggeration. He had retained an Irish accent, which the siblings shared as children, and this contributed to the perception that they were outsiders, never quite fitting into the Yorkshire community. A local woman later told Elizabeth Gaskell that the Brontë children had no friends in the village, and on one occasion when they were invited to a party, showed no knowledge of the games played by their peers. Left to their own devices, the siblings were unusually close, and remained so, especially Emily and Anne, who were described by a family friend, Ellen Nussey, as being "like twins".
Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell Brontë had received as a gift from his father, the children began to write stories, which they set in the complex imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria. These stories, which became increasingly detailed, were initially populated by these soldiers (referred to by the children as "The Young Men", or "the Twelves") as well as their real-life heroes, the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. The siblings created tiny books for the soldiers to "read", some of which are on display at the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, and, in December 1827 they produced a novel, Glass Town. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters.When Emily was thirteen, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives. With the exception of their Gondal poems and Anne's lists of Gondal's characters and place names, Emily and Anne's Gondal writings were largely not preserved. Among those that did survive are some "diary papers", written by Emily in her twenties, which describe current events in Gondal. The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage". The tales of Gondal also feature a queen called Augusta Geraldine Almeda, whose character bears some similarities with that of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. Similar themes of romanticism and noble savagery are apparent across the Brontës' juvenilia, including in Branwell's The Life of Alexander Percy, which tells the story of an all-consuming, death-defying, and ultimately self-destructive love, and which some believe may have been one of the inspirations for Wuthering Heights.