Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë the English novelist and poet (1818-1848) who wrote only one novel, Wuthering Heights, a work of extraordinary intensity that is now counted among the greatest novels in English, and whose poems are admired for their visionary power.

Family and the Haworth Parsonage

Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. She grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, where the family moved in 1820, in a setting of moorland and changing weather that shaped her imagination and appears throughout her writing.

Her mother died in 1821, and Emily was raised by her aunt Elizabeth Branwell and by her father. She was sent briefly to the school at Cowan Bridge, which she disliked, and was then educated mostly at home, reading widely in the parsonage library and sharing with her siblings the intense imaginative life of their invented worlds. She was reserved, strong-willed and intensely attached to the moors and to the freedom of the open landscape.

For a short time she taught at a school in Halifax and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, where she impressed her teachers with her musical and linguistic gifts. She found life away from home painful, however, and she returned to Haworth, where she kept house, walked the moors and wrote poetry, contributing to the imaginary world of Gondal that she and Anne had created.

The Poems and the 1846 Volume

Emily wrote poetry throughout her short life, though she was reluctant to publish. In 1845 Charlotte discovered a notebook of her poems and persuaded her that they deserved to appear in print. In 1846 the three sisters published a collection, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, with Emily taking the pen name Ellis Bell. The volume attracted little notice but marked their first appearance in print.

Emily's poems are usually regarded as the finest of the three sisters' verse. Their subjects are freedom, death, the imagination and the wild landscape, and their speakers long for release from the constraints of earthly existence. Poems such as The Prisoner and Remembrance have a stark, almost mystical quality, and some are set in the imagined world of Gondal, which gave her a way of writing about passion and exile without directly describing her own life.

Modern critics regard her as a genuine poet of the first rank, and her verse provides an essential key to the novel that followed. The same themes of longing, cruelty, nature and transcendence that animate the poems are worked out at greater length and with greater complexity in Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, the same year as Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and was initially met with puzzlement and even revulsion because of its violence and cruelty. It tells the story of the families of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and of the doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling brought to the isolated farmhouse by Catherine's father.

The novel is told through a complex frame narrative, involving the tenant Lockwood and the housekeeper Nelly Dean, and unfolds across two generations. Catherine and Heathcliff are bound by a passion that society and their own choices make impossible, and their relationship wrecks the lives around them and drives Heathcliff to a long campaign of revenge and cruelty. The second generation, in the persons of the younger Catherine and Hareton, offers the possibility of reconciliation and renewal.

The book is distinguished by its evocation of the moorland setting and its refusal to judge its characters from a comfortable moral distance. Its structure, its shifting narrative voices and its blend of realism with supernatural suggestion make it a work of great formal subtlety, and its treatment of love, class and revenge has provoked an almost inexhaustible flood of commentary.

Themes and Technique

Wuthering Heights is built around the contrast between nature and culture, embodied in the bleak farmhouse of the title and the more civilised estate of Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff is at once a victim of exclusion and a ruthless instrument of revenge, and the novel refuses to resolve the contradiction. Its world is governed by elemental forces, by storms and winds, and the landscape functions almost as a character in the drama.

The use of multiple narrators gives the story no single authoritative voice, so that the reader must weigh the accounts of Lockwood, of Nelly Dean and of the other characters. This technique, ahead of its time, creates ambiguity and unsettles any easy judgement. The novel's treatment of class and inheritance, of gender and of the supernatural, has made it a rich subject for critical interpretation.

Its language is spare and strong, charged with imagery of storm, fire and stone. The names and places are carefully chosen, and the parallel careers of the two generations are worked out with a symmetry that gives the book an almost mythic shape. It is a short novel, but its density and its emotional range are remarkable.

Death, Influence and Legacy

Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848, only a few months after her brother Branwell, apparently of tuberculosis, having refused medical help until the last stage of her illness. She was thirty years old. Her sister Anne died the following year, and Charlotte was left to guard and promote her sisters' literary reputations.

Wuthering Heights is now regarded as one of the greatest novels in English, admired for its originality, its uncompromising vision and its formal daring. At first overshadowed by Jane Eyre, it has come to be seen as the more radical work, and it has been adapted many times for film, theatre and other media. The characters of Catherine and Heathcliff have become archetypes of tragic passion.

Her poems too have gained recognition, and she is read as a poet as well as a novelist. Interpretations of her work continue to multiply, ranging from readings that emphasise the Gothic and the supernatural to readings that stress its social and psychological realism. She is remembered as one of the most original writers of the nineteenth century, an author who produced a masterpiece and a substantial body of poetry in a life of barely thirty years and whose work continues to resist every attempt to reduce it to a single meaning.

See also

• Wuthering Heights
• Charlotte Brontë
• Gothic fiction
• The moors