Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, with her poems finding regarded as a poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to Maria Branwell and an Irish father, Patrick Brontë. The family was living on Market Street in the village of Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Emily was the second youngest of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Branwell. In 1820, Emily's younger sister Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Shortly thereafter, the family moved eight miles away to Haworth, where Patrick was employed as perpetual curate. 

In Haworth, the children would have opportunities to develop their literary talents. When Emily was only three, and all six children under the age of eight, she and her siblings lost their mother, Maria, to cancer on 15 September 1821. Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt, and Maria's sister were to care for the younger children.

Emily's three elder sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte, were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At age six, on 25 November 1824, Emily joined her sisters at school for a brief period. At school, however, the children suffered abuse and privations, and when a typhoid epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth became ill. Maria, who may actually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Elizabeth died shortly after.

The four youngest Brontë children, all under ten years of age, had suffered the loss of the three eldest women in their immediate family. Charlotte maintained that the school's poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development and that it had hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died in 1825. After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from school. Charlotte would use her experiences and knowledge of the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre.

The three remaining sisters and their brother Branwell were thereafter educated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell. A shy girl, Emily was very close to her siblings and was known as a great animal lover, especially for befriending stray dogs she found wandering around the countryside. Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had access to a wide range of published material; favorites included Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.

Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell had received as a gift, the children began to write stories, which they set in a number of invented imaginary worlds populated by their soldiers and their heroes, the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters. Initially, all four children shared in creating stories about a world called Angria.

However, when Emily was 13, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story. They began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives. With the exception of their Gondal poems and Anne's lists of Gondal's characters and place names, Emily and Anne's Gondal writings were largely not preserved. 

Among those that did survive are some "diary papers," written by Emily in her twenties, which describe current events in Gondal. The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage": romantic outlaws capable of more nobility, passion, and bravery than the denizens of "civilization." Similar themes of romanticism and noble savagery are apparent across Brontë's juvenilia, notably in Branwell's The Life of Alexander Percy, which tells the story of all-consuming, death-defying, and ultimately self-destructive love and is generally considered an inspiration for Wuthering Heights.