Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë was born in 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of six children. She grew up in Haworth with her sisters Charlotte and Anne and her brother Branwell, who died of tuberculosis and opium addiction in September 1848; Emily followed him in December of the same year, and Anne died in May 1849. The Brontë siblings died in a cluster, three within nine months, in their thirties and twenties. Emily was thirty when she died, having published one novel.

Wuthering Heights (1847), published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, received mixed reviews on publication — it was found brutal, coarse, and implausible — and was overshadowed by Charlotte's Jane Eyre, published the same year. Its posthumous reputation grew steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until it became one of the canonical texts of English literature, routinely placed among the greatest novels in the language. The gap between initial reception and eventual status is unusual even for Victorian fiction.

The novel's structure is deliberately difficult: a frame narrative (Lockwood, the narrator, listening to Nelly Dean, who was there) at two removes from the events, which themselves span two generations. Heathcliff is the adopted son of a Yorkshire farmer who becomes the vehicle for a revenge that continues into the next generation, systematically ruining the families that humiliated him. His relationship with Catherine Earnshaw — "I am Heathcliff" she says, meaning that he is not separate from her but constitutive of her identity — is not a love story in the conventional sense. It is something stranger and more violent, a description of two people who can neither be together nor separately exist.

What makes the novel extraordinary is not the plot but the atmosphere and the psychological accuracy of its refusal to provide moral categories. Heathcliff commits acts of sustained cruelty — he destroys Hindley through drink, kidnaps young Cathy, makes Linton a vehicle for inheritance — that a conventional Victorian novel would require the reader to judge. Emily Brontë does not judge. She presents and describes and lets the reader decide what to do with it. The landscape — the moors, the two houses (Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange), the weather — is not background but moral climate: wild, indifferent, neither punishing nor rewarding.

She is also a significant poet, though this is less recognized than her novel. "No Coward Soul Is Mine," written close to her death, is one of the great Victorian religious poems: a defiant, pantheistic assertion against the fear of death that reads nothing like conventional Victorian religiosity. Her poetry was included in the 1846 collection Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, writing under pseudonyms), which sold two copies.

Her biography is almost entirely contained in the account above: she was shy, avoided strangers, was attached to the moors with a specific intensity that Charlotte described as bordering on the mystical, and died of tuberculosis within months of her brother, refusing until almost the end to see a doctor. She left one novel and about 200 poems.