Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was an English novelist and poet whose small body of published work had a profound influence on later English literature. Born at Thornton in Yorkshire, she grew up at Haworth Parsonage with her literary sisters Charlotte and Anne and their brother Branwell. Much of her imaginative life was shaped by the isolated Yorkshire moors and by the elaborate fictional world of Gondal, which she developed with Anne and used as the setting for many of her poems. In 1846, the three sisters published a joint poetry collection under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, with Emily writing as Ellis Bell. Reserved and strongly attached to Haworth, she spent only limited periods away from home and died of tuberculosis in 1848, aged thirty. More than two hundred poems survive, distinguished by their compressed language, dramatic speakers and recurring concerns with freedom, mortality, nature and spiritual endurance.

Brontë wrote only one novel, Wuthering Heights, published under the name Ellis Bell in 1847. Set on the Yorkshire moors, it recounts the destructive relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and the consequences their passions, resentments and social ambitions have for two generations of the Earnshaw and Linton families. The framing narrative takes place in 1801–02, while the principal story begins in the 1770s, making it substantially set in the historical past even though it is not usually classified as conventional historical fiction. Its isolated houses, changing inheritance, class tensions and harsh rural environment create a world that feels removed from the industrialising Britain in which Brontë wrote. Initially criticised for its violence and unconventional structure, the novel is now regarded as a major work of Gothic and Victorian fiction, notable for its unreliable narrators, moral ambiguity and refusal to present either Heathcliff or Catherine as a simple romantic hero.