Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë was an English poet and the author of the novel Wuthering Heights.

For several months in 1835, Emily attended Roe Head School, but soon returned to Haworth because she was homesick. In 1837 she served as a governess in Low Hill, a suburb of Halifax, and in 1842 she went with Charlotte to Brussels to continue her education. After returning from Brussels, she never left Haworth for the rest of her life.

In 1846, her collection Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published. Emily’s poems, under the name “Ellis,” received rather high critical praise. In 1847 her novel Wuthering Heights was published, which later brought her fame. During Emily’s lifetime, the novel remained almost unnoticed, and only after her death, when Charlotte arranged for a second edition, was Wuthering Heights greeted with a chorus of praise as a true masterpiece, though with certain reservations.

In her biographical note, Charlotte remarked on the “terrible, great gloom” permeating the narrative about the two Yorkshire families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their evil genius Heathcliff. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff are bound by a stormy, demonic, rebellious passion. Their love is tragic. Only after death are they miraculously united, their bodies lying in the same coffin. The well-known English writer E. Gaskell wrote that the novel Wuthering Heights caused in many readers a shudder of horror and “disgust at the expressiveness… with which evil… characters were depicted.” However, the novel is marked by moral strength and wisdom; reason and justice oppose cruelty, treachery, and madness.

Unlike Charlotte, Emily Brontë had no close friends, rarely wrote letters, and loved few people, except her family. Her character was marked by stoic firmness and mysticism.

At present, her poetry is especially highly regarded. The poems “Remembrance,” “The Prisoner,” “No coward soul is mine,” and others brought her fame as a talented poet no less original than Blake, Shelley, and Byron