Brontë

At the age of six, Emily shared her sister Charlotte's unhappy experience at Cowan Bridge school, and was sent with Anne to Roe Head school in 1836. Emily hated being away from home and returned after a few months. Of all the sisters she was the most passionately attached to the moorlands around Haworth, which have a powerful presence in her poetry and in her novel, Wuthering Heights. In 1837, Emily was a governess at Law Hill School, near Halifax, and in 1842 she went to Brussels with Charlotte to study and teach at the Pensionnat Héger, but she returned to Haworth at the end of the year because of her aunt's death and stayed there for what remained of her life.

A selection of her poems was first published in 1846, but attracted little attention. Wuthering Heights, a haunting and passionate saga set in Yorkshire, was written between October 1845 and June 1846, and was published by Thomas Newby in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, to the bewilderment of the reading public. It was only after her death that the book became widely accepted as one of the most important novels of the 19th century. Her poetry is also now considered as among the most significant of the period, with its wild landscapes and its longing, individual voice. Best known are “The Night is Darkening Around Me” and the visionary “No Coward Soul is Mine”. Emily certainly seems to have been “no coward soul”, although very little writing apart from her poems and Wuthering Heights survives her. She had no close friends and did not write letters. Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell that much of her portrayal of the independently minded and courageous Shirley Keeldar in Shirley was based on Emily. Charlotte also reported that throughout her last consumptive illness, extremely painful in its later stages, Emily refused all drugs and medical attention. She died in December 1848. Although Emily achieved no fame in her lifetime, her extraordinarily individual and powerful writing continues to fascinate readers and critics today.