Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë wrote only one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), and about two hundred poems, and died at thirty; yet she is one of the most original writers in English. Wuthering Heights, published under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”, baffled and shocked its first readers with its violence, its savage passions and its strange structure, and is now considered one of the greatest novels in the language. Her poems — “No coward soul is mine”, “Remembrance”, “The Prisoner” — are among the finest by any Victorian poet. She remains the most enigmatic of the Brontës: reserved, intensely private, devoted to the moors, her animals and her imaginary world of Gondal, fiercely independent, and of a visionary temperament that her sister Charlotte struggled to describe.

Life

Emily was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of the six children of Patrick and Maria Brontë, and moved with the family to the parsonage at Haworth in 1820. Her mother died when she was three. She was sent briefly, aged six, with her elder sisters to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, and was brought home after Maria and Elizabeth fell fatally ill.

With Anne, her closest companion, she created the imaginary island kingdom of Gondal in the North Pacific — a world of passionate, warring royalty, prisons and exiles — and continued writing Gondal poems and stories into adulthood, long after Charlotte had abandoned Angria. Her surviving diary papers, written with Anne every few years, record domestic details and Gondal events side by side: “The Gondals are discovering the interior of Gaaldine… Sally Mosley is washing in the back-kitchen.”

She tried to leave home several times and always fell ill. At seventeen she went to Roe Head school with Charlotte as a teacher’s pupil and returned home within three months, pining for the moors; Charlotte wrote: “Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished.” In 1838 she worked for six months as a teacher at Law Hill school near Halifax — seventeen hours a day — and told her pupils that she preferred the school’s dog to any of them. In 1842 she went with Charlotte to the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, where Monsieur Héger thought her gifted, with “a powerful reason” and “a strong imperious will”, fit to be a great navigator. She returned to Haworth on the death of their aunt and stayed there for the rest of her life, keeping house for her father, baking bread, walking the moors with her mastiff Keeper, and writing.

In 1845 Charlotte discovered a notebook of Emily’s poems and was struck by their power: “not at all like the poetry women generally write… condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine… a peculiar music — wild, melancholy, and elevating.” Emily was furious at the intrusion, but was persuaded to contribute to the sisters’ Poems (1846) as Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights, probably written in 1845–46, was published in December 1847, together with Anne’s Agnes Grey, by the unscrupulous Thomas Newby, two months after Jane Eyre. Reviewers found it powerful but coarse and brutal; many assumed it was an early work by the author of Jane Eyre.

Her brother Branwell died in September 1848. Emily caught a cold at his funeral, which developed into tuberculosis. She refused to see a doctor, refused to rest, and continued her household tasks until she could barely breathe. On 19 December 1848 she rose, dressed, and tried to do her work; at two in the afternoon, on the sofa, she said “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now” — and died soon after, aged thirty. Charlotte wrote: “Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now.”

Poetry

Emily’s poems, many set in Gondal but transcending it, are spare, intense and visionary. In “Remembrance” (“Cold in the earth — and the deep snow piled above thee”), a Gondal queen mourns a lover dead fifteen years. In “The Prisoner”, a captive woman describes a mystical visitation that frees her spirit: “Oh! dreadful is the check — intense the agony — / When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; / When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; / The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.” Her last poem, according to Charlotte, was “No coward soul is mine”:

No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven’s glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear… Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain… There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void: Thou — THOU art Being and Breath, And what THOU art may never be destroyed.

Character and legend

After her death, Charlotte’s preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë shaped the image of Emily as an untutored genius of the moors, stoic, stern and otherworldly. Charlotte half-apologised for the novel: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” Modern scholars stress her learning (she read Byron, Scott, German literature and the Blackwood’s magazine tales of terror) and her deliberate artistry. Her reticence has made her a magnet for biographical speculation, about her sexuality, her religion and her relationship to Heathcliff.

In conversation

• “I am Heathcliff” — the claim of total identification with another.
• Emily Brontë’s moors — wildness, freedom and solitude.
• “No coward soul is mine” — defiance in the face of death.