Emily Brontë
(July 30, 1818 – December 19, 1848) was the younger sister of
Charlotte Brontë and the fifth of six children in the noted family of
Patrick Brontë, an Irish Anglican curate, and his wife Maria Branwell.
Her mother died when she was three, and she was educated at the family
home in Naworth, Yorkshire by her father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell
after a brief period at the Clergy Daughter’s School. A typhoid epidemic
at the school prompted the removal of the girls and claimed the lives
of her two oldest sisters. The remaining children were exposed to a wide
range of literature of the day and spent much of their leisure time
enacting imaginary adventures and writing fiction. At seventeen Emily
attended Roe Head’s girl’s school, where her sister Charlotte was a
teacher, but stayed only a few months. At twenty she taught school in
Halifax but lasted less than a year under the demands of the
seventeen-hour workdays. The sisters had an ambition to open a small
school, and traveled to Brussels in 1842 to perfect their French and
German, but were forced to return to England following the death of
their aunt. Emily was a solitary, shy person and seemed to have had no
friends outside her family. She was an ardent lover of nature, a keen
observer of others, a kind and warm listener, but volunteered little of
her own thoughts and feelings. She was described by Eva Hope in Queens
of Literature of the Victorian Era as having “a peculiar mixture of
timidity and Spartan-like courage”. Wuthering Heights was published in
1847 under a masculine pseudonym and she was never recognized as its
author during her lifetime. She died three months after the death of her
brother Branwell in 1848 of tuberculosis that developed after catching a
severe cold at his funeral and refusing medical treatment.
