Emily Brontë
1 book analyzed
Biography
Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848) lived thirty years, left Yorkshire fewer than five times, wrote one novel, a collection of poems, and died of tuberculosis less than a year after Wuthering Heights was published — refusing medical treatment, refusing to take to her bed, working until she could no longer hold a pen. She was the most private of the three Brontë sisters, never married, never (as far as any record shows) experienced romantic love, and wrote the most savage and passionate love story in the English language. She grew up on the Yorkshire moors with her sisters Charlotte and Anne and her doomed brother Branwell in the parsonage at Haworth, attending school briefly (she was sent home sick from Cowan Bridge at eight, possibly the school that killed her elder sisters), and otherwise largely self-educated through an extraordinary program of shared fantasy writing. From childhood, she and Anne created the fantasy world of Gondal — a complex imaginary world set on a northern island, filled with war, political intrigue, and passionate, violent protagonists — and continued writing Gondal poetry well into adulthood. Most of the Gondal prose is lost, but the poetry survives and shows the same preoccupations as Wuthering Heights: transgression, passion, landscapes as emotional states, the refusal to submit. Wuthering Heights was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell — all three sisters used male pen names to be taken seriously in the literary marketplace. Charlotte had to fight to keep it in print after Emily died. The novel's first reception was deeply hostile: too crude, too violent, too morally purposeless. The rehabilitation came slowly, over decades, until it became one of the most studied novels in the English language.