Early life and education

The three Bront sisters, in an 1834 painting by their brother Branwell Bront. From
left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. (Branwell used to be between Emily an
d Charlotte, but subsequently painted himself out.)
Emily Bront was born on 30 July 1818 in the village of Thornton, West Riding of Y
orkshire, in Northern England, to Maria Branwell and an Irish father, Patrick Br
ont.[3] She was the younger sister of Charlotte Bront and the fifth of six childre
n, though the two oldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, died in childhood.[4][5] In
1820, shortly after the birth of Emily's younger sister Anne, the family moved
eight miles away to Haworth, where Patrick was employed as perpetual curate; her
e the children developed their literary talents.[6][7]
After the death of their mother on 15 September 1821 from cancer, when Emily was
three years old, the older sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte were sent to
the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, where they encountered abuse and p
rivations later described by Charlotte in Jane Eyre. At the age of six on 25 Nov
ember 1824, Emily joined her sisters at school for a brief period.[10] When a ty
phoid epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth caught it. Maria, who may a
ctually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Emily was subseque
ntly removed from the school, in June 1825, along with Charlotte and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth died soon after their return home.[9]
The three remaining sisters and their brother Patrick Branwell were thereafter e
ducated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell, their mother's sist
er. Their father, an Irish Anglican clergyman, was very strict and during the da
y he would work in his office while the children were to remain silent in a room
together. Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had acce
ss to a wide range of published material; favourites included Sir Walter Scott,
Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.[9][11]
Emily's Gondal poems
In their leisure time the children began to write fiction at home, inspired by a
box of toy soldiers Branwell had received as a gift[12] and created a number of
fantasy worlds (including 'Angria') which featured in stories they wrote all "v
ery strange ones" according to Charlotte[13] and enacted about the imaginary adv
entures of their toy soldiers along with the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Ch
arles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, ex
cept for poems spoken by characters.[14][15] When Emily was 13, she and Anne wit
hdrew 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 thro
ughout their lives.[9] With the exception of Emily's Gondal poems and Anne's lis
ts of Gondal's characters and place-names, their writings on Gondal were not pre
served. Some "diary papers" of Emily's have survived in which she describes curr
ent events in Gondal, some of which were written, others enacted with Anne. One
dates from 1841, when Emily was twenty-three: another from 1845, when she was tw
enty-seven.[16]
At seventeen, Emily attended the Roe Head Girls' School,[9] where Charlotte was
a teacher but managed to stay only a few months before being overcome by extreme
homesickness.[17] She returned home and Anne took her place.[18] At this time,
the girls' objective was to obtain sufficient education to open a small school o
f their own.
Adulthood
Constantin Hger, teacher of Charlotte and Emily during their stay in Brussels, on
a daguerreotype dated c. 1865
Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School in Halifax beginning in September 1838

, when she was twenty.[19] Her health broke under the stress of the 17-hour work
day and she returned home in April 1839.[20] Thereafter she became the stay-athome daughter, doing most of the cooking, ironing, and cleaning and teaching Sun
day school.[21] She taught herself German out of books and also practised piano.
[22][23]
In 1842, Emily accompanied Charlotte to the Hger Pensionnat in Brussels, Belgium,
where they attended the girls' academy run by Constantin Hger. They planned to p
erfect their French and German in anticipation of opening their school. Nine of
Emily's French essays survive from this period. Hger seems to have been impressed
with the strength of Emily's character, and made the following assertion:
She should have been a man a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have ded
uced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong impe
rious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have
given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument
unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stu
bborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own
wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.[24]
The two sisters were committed to their studies and by the end of the term had a
ttained such competence in French that Madame Hger made a proposal for both to st
ay another half-year, even offering to dismiss the English master, according to
Charlotte, so that she could take his place, while Emily was to teach music.[25]
[26][27] However, the illness and death of their aunt meant that they returned t
o Haworth and though they did try to open a school at their home, they were unab
le to attract students to the remote area.
In 1844, Emily began going through all the poems she had written, recopying them
neatly into two notebooks. One was labelled "Gondal Poems"; the other was unlab
elled. Scholars such as Fannie Ratchford and Derek Roper have attempted to piece
together a Gondal storyline and chronology from these poems.[28][29] In the aut
umn of 1845, Charlotte discovered the notebooks and insisted that the poems be p
ublished. Emily, furious at the invasion of her privacy, at first refused[30][31
] but relented when Anne brought out her own manuscripts and revealed she had be
en writing poems in secret as well.[32]
In 1846, the sisters' poems were published in one volume as Poems by Currer, Ell
is, and Acton Bell. The Bront sisters had adopted pseudonyms for publication, pre
serving their initials: Charlotte was "Currer Bell", Emily was "Ellis Bell" and
Anne was "Acton Bell".[33] Charlotte wrote in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis
and Acton Bell' that their "ambiguous choice" was "dictated by a sort of conscie
ntious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did no
t like to declare ourselves women, because... we had a vague impression that aut
horesses are liable to be looked on with prejudice".[34] Charlotte contributed 2
0 poems, and Emily and Anne each contributed 21. Although the sisters were told
several months after publication that only two copies had sold,[35] they were no
t discouraged (of their two readers, one was impressed enough to request their a
utographs).[36] The Athenaeum reviewer praised Ellis Bell's work for its music a
nd power, singling out his poems as the best: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint sp
irit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted",[37
] and The Critic reviewer recognised "the presence of more genius than it was su
pposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellec
t."[38]
Personality and character[edit]
Emily Bront remains a mysterious figure and a challenge to biographers because in
formation about her is sparse,[39] due to her solitary and reclusive nature.[40]
[41] She does not seem to have made any friends outside her family.[42] Her sist
er Charlotte remains the primary source of information about her, although as Em

ily's elder sister, writing publicly about her shortly after her death, Charlott
e is not a neutral witness.[43] According to Lucasta Miller, in her analysis of
Bront biographies, "Charlotte took on the role of Emily's first mythographer."[44
] In the Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights, in 1850, Charlotte
wrote:
My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and
fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on th
e hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the pe
ople round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with ver
y few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, thei
r language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and ta
lk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but WITH them, she rarely
exchanged a word.[45][46]
Emily's unsociability and extremely shy nature has subsequently been reported ma
ny times.[47][48][49] According to Norma Crandall, her "warm, human aspect" was
"usually revealed only in her love of nature and of animals".[50] In a similar d
escription, Literary news (1883) states: "[Emily] loved the solemn moors, she lo
ved all wild, free creatures and things",[51] and critics attest that her love o
f the moors is manifest in Wuthering Heights.[52] Over the years, Emily's love o
f nature has been the subject of many anecdotes. A newspaper dated 31 December 1
899, gives the folksy account that "with bird and beast [Emily] had the most int
imate relations, and from her walks she often came with fledgling or young rabbi
t in hand, talking softly to it, quite sure, too, that it understood".[53] The f
ollowing anecdote is also related:
Once she was bitten by a dog that she saw running by in great distress, and to w
hich she offered water. The dog was mad. She said no word to any one, but hersel
f burned the lacerated flesh to the bone with the red hot poker, and no one knew
of it until the red scar was accidentally discovered some weeks after, and symp
athetic questioning brought out this story.[53]
In Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era (1886), Eva Hope summarises Emily's
character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage", and goe
s on to say, "She was painfully shy, but physically she was brave to a surprisin
g degree. She loved few persons, but those few with a passion of self-sacrificin
g tenderness and devotion. To other people's failings she was understanding and
forgiving, but over herself she kept a continual and most austere watch, never a
llowing herself to deviate for one instant from what she considered her duty."[5
4]
Title page of the original edition of Wuthering Heights (1847)
Wuthering Heights[edit]
Main article: Wuthering Heights
Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights was first published in London in 1847, appearing
as the first two volumes of a three-volume set that included Anne Bront's Agnes G
rey. The authors were printed as being Ellis and Acton Bell; Emily's real name d
id not appear until 1850, when it was printed on the title page of an edited com
mercial edition.[55] The novel's innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics.
Wuthering Heights's violence and passion led the Victorian public and many early
reviewers to think that it had been written by a man.[56] According to Juliet G
ardiner, "the vivid sexual passion and power of its language and imagery impress
ed, bewildered and appalled reviewers."[57] Even though it received mixed review
s when it first came out, and was often condemned for its portrayal of amoral pa
ssion, the book subsequently became an English literary classic.[58]
Although a letter from her publisher indicates that Emily had begun to write a s

econd novel, the manuscript has never been found. Perhaps Emily, or a member of
her family, eventually destroyed the manuscript, if it existed, when she was pre
vented by illness from completing it. It has also been suggested that, though le
ss likely, the letter could have been intended for Anne Bront, who was already wr
iting The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her second novel. In any case, no manuscript
of a second novel by Emily has survived.[59]
Death[edit]
Emily believed that her health, like her sisters', had been weakened by the hars
h local climate and by unsanitary conditions at home,[60] the source of water be
ing contaminated by runoff from the church's graveyard.[61] She caught a severe
cold[62][63] during the funeral of her brother Branwell in September 1848 and wa
s soon showing symptoms of tuberculosis. (It should be noted by the modern reade
r, though many of her contemporaries believed otherwise, "consumption", or tuber
culosis does not originate from "catching a cold". Tuberculosis is a communicabl
e disease, transmitted through the inhalation of airborne droplets of mucus or s
aliva carrying Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and anyone living in close proximity
with an infected person would be in an increased risk of contracting it. However
, it is also a disease that can remain asymptomatic for long periods of time aft
er initial infection, and developing only later on when the immune system become
s weak.)[64] Though her condition worsened steadily, she rejected medical help a
nd all proffered remedies, saying that she would have "no poisoning doctor" near
her.[65][66] On the morning of 19 December 1848, Charlotte, fearing for her sis
ter, wrote this:
She grows daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed too obscurely to b
e of use he sent some medicine which she would not take. Moments so dark as thes
e I have never known I pray for God's support to us all.[67]
At noon, Emily was worse; she could only whisper in gasps. With her last audible
words she said to Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now
"[68] but it was too late. She died that same day at about two in the afternoon
while sitting on the sofa at Haworth Parsonage.[69][70][71] It was less than thr
ee months since Branwell's death, which led a housemaid to declare that "Miss Em
ily died of a broken heart for love of her brother".[70][72] Emily had grown so
thin that her coffin measured only 16 inches wide. The carpenter said he had nev
er made a narrower one for an adult.[73][74] She was interred in the Church of S
t Michael and All Angels family capsule, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England. Emily
Bront never knew the extent of fame she achieved with her one and only novel, Wu
thering Heights, as she died a year after its publication, aged 30.