Emily Brontë

She never wanted to be known.

Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the fifth child of Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman, and Maria Branwell, who came from Penzance in Cornwall. When Emily was two years old the family moved to Haworth, a village perched above the Worth Valley on the edge of the moors, and it was there — in the parsonage beside the churchyard, with the wind coming off the heather — that she would spend almost the whole of her short life.

She outlived her mother and her two eldest sisters, both of whom died of tuberculosis in childhood. The three who remained — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — grew up in one another’s company, writing from an early age, inventing imaginary kingdoms, filling tiny handmade books with stories too small to read without a magnifying glass. Emily’s private world was called Gondal, a northern island kingdom populated with passionate, violent, ungovernable people. She wrote about it all her life and never let anyone see it.

She attended school briefly — once at Cowan Bridge, where her sisters Maria and Elizabeth died, and later at Law Hill near Halifax, where she worked as a teacher for six months and hated almost every minute of it. Brussels followed, in 1842, when she and Charlotte travelled to the Pensionnat Heger to improve their French and German. Emily was not unhappy in Brussels exactly, but she was elsewhere in her mind. She came home when her aunt died and never left Yorkshire again.

The poems came first. In 1845 Charlotte discovered Emily’s private notebook by accident and persuaded her, against considerable resistance, to publish a selection. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell appeared in 1846 — the Bell pseudonyms chosen to disguise three women writing in a world suspicious of them — and sold two copies. Emily seemed almost relieved.

Then came Wuthering Heights, published in December 1847. It was received with bewilderment, unease, and occasional horror. Critics could not quite account for it. The violence, the obsession, the moors as something almost alive — it did not fit any category they had. It has never fitted any category since.

Emily Brontë died of pulmonary tuberculosis on 19 December 1848, at Haworth Parsonage, aged thirty. She had refused medical attention until it was far too late, and by some accounts refused it even then. She was buried in the family vault beneath the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Haworth, alongside her mother, her father, and most of her siblings.

She left behind one novel and a body of poetry — much of it still unpublished at her death — that would eventually come to be considered among the finest written in English. She had asked for none of it.