Emily Jane Brontë ( / ˈ b r ɒ n t i / , commonly /- t eɪ / ; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English writer best known for her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. She also wrote a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne. The book was called Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

Emily was the fifth of six Brontë children, and four of them lived to adulthood. Her mother, Maria Branwell, died when she was three years old. After that, Emily and her siblings were cared for by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Most of Emily’s education happened at home, where her father, Patrick Brontë, taught her. Patrick was the curate of Haworth. Emily was very close to her siblings, especially her younger sister Anne. Together, they wrote stories and journals about imaginary places called Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal. Her sister Charlotte described Emily as quiet, determined, and different from others. She also loved nature and animals.

Most of Emily’s life was spent at home in Haworth. She helped the family servant with chores, played the piano, and learned from books on her own. She briefly went to school and later studied and taught in Brussels with her sister Charlotte.

Emily’s novel was first published under the name Ellis Bell. At the time, many people did not like it, saying the characters in Wuthering Heights were not kind or proper. However, the book is now considered a classic in English literature. Emily Brontë died in 1848, when she was 30 years old. This was one year after her novel was published.

Early life

Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, to Maria Branwell, the daughter of a wealthy merchant and property owner from Penzance, and Patrick Brontë, a church leader from an Irish family with few resources. The Brontë family lived in Market Street, Thornton, a village near Bradford in Yorkshire. Their home is now a public museum called the Brontë Birthplace.

Emily was the fifth of six children, with older siblings named Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Branwell. In 1820, the youngest Brontë child, Anne, was born. Shortly after, the family moved 12 miles (19 kilometers) to Haworth, a village in the Pennines, where Patrick Brontë became a church leader. Haworth had many health problems, including poor water quality due to an overcrowded graveyard nearby. These conditions likely affected the health of Emily and her siblings.

On September 15, 1821, Maria Branwell died after a long illness, which her nurse believed was uterine cancer. Her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, moved in to care for the children. Elizabeth was not very warm or nurturing, eating separately from the family. She is described in some writings as strict, though others note she also showed kindness.

In 1824, Emily and her three older sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School in Cowan Bridge. At six years old, Emily was the youngest student, and the school described her as a favorite. However, the school had poor food, bad hygiene, harsh rules, and frequent illnesses like typhoid and tuberculosis. In 1825, two of Emily’s sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, became seriously ill at the school and died of tuberculosis within three months. After this, Charlotte and Emily returned to Haworth, where they were educated at home by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, and a servant named Tabby Ackroyd.

Patrick Brontë and Elizabeth Branwell encouraged the children to read and learn about politics. Although girls could not use the public library, Branwell shared books with his sisters, and Patrick had a large personal library for the family. The children read many books, including Aesop’s Fables, Arabian Nights, and Blackwood’s Magazine. Patrick Brontë also bought a piano in 1833 or 1834, and Emily learned to play it well. The children also studied drawing, painting, Latin, and classical literature.

Patrick Brontë wanted his children to have a good education but was emotionally distant and had unusual habits, like always carrying a loaded gun. Some stories say he was angry and once destroyed his wife’s dress, but these accounts are now considered exaggerated. The Brontë children had an Irish accent, which made them feel like outsiders in their Yorkshire community. A local woman later told a biographer that the Brontë children had no friends in the village and did not know the games played by their peers. Without friends, the siblings became very close, especially Emily and Anne, who were described as “like twins” by a family friend.

Inspired by a gift of toy soldiers, the Brontë children created stories set in imaginary worlds called Glass Town and Angria. These stories included their soldiers, real-life heroes like the Duke of Wellington, and tiny books for the soldiers to “read.” In 1827, they wrote a novel called Glass Town. Few of Emily’s early works survive, except for poems written by her characters.

At thirteen, Emily and Anne left the Angria stories to create a new one about Gondal, a fictional island. Their Gondal stories included poems and descriptions of characters and places, though most of their writings were not saved. Some of Emily’s diary entries from her twenties describe events in Gondal. The heroes in Gondal resembled Scottish Highlanders, a type of character often called the “noble savage.” These stories share themes with other Brontë works, such as Wuthering Heights, which tells a tale of intense, destructive love.

Adulthood

At seventeen, Emily went to Roe Head Girls' School, where Charlotte was a teacher. This was the first time Emily had been to school since her short time at Cowan Bridge. At this time, the goal for the girls was to learn enough to start their own small school. Emily had a hard time adjusting to life at Roe Head and left after only a few months. Anne took her place. Later, Charlotte said this was because Emily missed home very much and found it hard to follow the school's rules and daily schedule. She said she was worried Emily would have died if she had not been allowed to return home.

In September 1838, when Emily was twenty, she became a teacher at Law Hill School in Halifax, a town in Yorkshire. Her health suffered because of the long workday, which lasted seventeen hours. She did not enjoy teaching the students and said she preferred spending time with the house dog. However, she continued writing and created several poems during this time. In April 1839, she returned home to Haworth, where she helped the family's servant with cooking, ironing, and cleaning. She taught herself German using books and played the piano, becoming a skilled pianist. She also continued working on her Gondal stories, which are now known through a series of poems. Many of these poems show her interest in tragic, Byronic characters, similar to Heathcliff.

In 1842, when Emily was twenty-four, she went to study at the Heger Pensionnat, a girls' boarding school in Brussels, with Charlotte. Charlotte wanted to spend six months there to improve her French, Italian, and German. She also hoped they could find jobs abroad, though she only told Emily about this plan. Their tuition and travel costs were paid by their aunt, Branwell, and the Jenkins family, who promised to look after them. However, the Jenkins family stopped inviting the sisters after a while, as they found Charlotte to be socially awkward and Emily to use very short words.

Charlotte and Emily also struggled to fit in at the school. They were older than most students, had trouble with lessons taught in French, and were a small group of Protestants in a mostly Catholic school. Unlike Charlotte, who tried to fit in by changing her clothes, Emily was unhappy in Brussels and was teased for not wearing Belgian-style clothing. A classmate, Laetitia Wheelwright, said:

Constantin Heger, who ran the school, thought highly of Emily. Later, he told Mrs. Gaskell that he believed Emily's intelligence was "something even higher" than Charlotte's. Few of Emily's French essays from this time remain, mostly based on literary works chosen by Constantin Heger. Both sisters worked hard and became very skilled in French. Madame Heger, Constantin's wife, suggested they stay for another half-year. She even offered to fire the English teacher so Charlotte could take his place. By this time, Emily had become a skilled pianist and teacher, and it was suggested she might stay to teach music. This would allow the sisters to continue their studies without paying for their board or tuition. Emily's first students in Brussels were the three young daughters of a local family, the Wheelwrights. The family liked Charlotte but disliked Emily. Laetitia Wheelwright later said this was because Emily refused to teach the children during her own school hours, taking their playtime instead. Despite this, Emily seemed happier during this time and made a friend, a sixteen-year-old Belgian student named Louise de Bassompierre, to whom she gave a signed drawing.

Unfortunately, the sudden illness and death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, forced the sisters to return to Haworth. A letter from Constantin Heger to Patrick Brontë, asking the girls to stay, showed that Emily was about to take music lessons from a famous teacher and was finally becoming more comfortable in social situations. However, she stayed in Haworth to manage the household while Charlotte returned to Brussels without her. In 1844, when Charlotte came back, the sisters tried to start a school at the Parsonage but failed because they could not attract students to the remote area.

In February 1844, Emily began organizing all the poems she had written, copying them into two notebooks. One was labeled "Gondal Poems," and the other had no label. Scholars like Fannie Ratchford and Derek Roper have tried to understand the Gondal story and timeline from these poems. In the autumn of 1845, Charlotte found the notebooks and insisted the poems be published. Emily was angry about this invasion of her privacy and refused at first. However, she agreed when Anne showed her own poems, revealing she had also been writing in secret. Around this time, Emily wrote one of her most famous poems, "No coward soul is mine." Some critics believe it is about Anne Brontë, while others think it is a response to the violation of her privacy. Charlotte later said it was Emily's final poem, but this is not true. Although it was the last poem copied into Emily's notebook, she continued writing poetry, focusing more on prose later.

In 1846, the sisters published their poems at their own expense through a small London publisher called Aylott & Jones. The book was titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. On the advice of Emily and Anne, the Brontë sisters used pseudonyms to protect their identities, keeping their initials: Charlotte became "Currer Bell," Emily became "Ellis Bell," and Anne became "Acton Bell." Charlotte wrote in the "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell" that their choice of pseudonyms was "dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because… we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice." Charlotte contributed nineteen poems, and Emily and Anne each contributed twenty-one. Emily made changes to some of her poems to hide their Gondal origins.

Although the sisters were told months after publication that only two copies of the book had sold, they were not discouraged. One of the two buyers asked for their autographs. A reviewer in The Athenaeum praised Ellis Bell's work for its music and power, calling her poems the best in the book: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint spirit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted." Another reviewer in The Critic recognized "the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect." After Charlotte's attempts to gain more interest in the poems failed, she sent copies to famous poets like William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, and Ebenezer Elliott. She then told Aylott & Jones that "C, E & A Bell are now preparing for the Press a work of fiction – consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales which may be published either together as a work of 3 vols of the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vols." The three novels she referred to were The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights was first published in London by Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847. This came shortly after Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre became successful in October 1847, when it was published by Smith, Elder & Co. Thomas Newby, who had delayed publishing Emily and Anne Brontë's works, eventually decided to use the Brontë family's connection to his advantage. Wuthering Heights was released as the first two volumes of a three-volume set that also included Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey. At the time, the authors were listed as Ellis and Acton Bell. Emily Brontë's real name was not revealed until after her death in 1850, when it appeared on the title page of a later edition.

The novel is a Gothic story that explores themes of doomed love, hatred, revenge, and the supernatural. It follows the relationships of several couples connected to the farmhouse named in the title. Although the story is set in Yorkshire, it draws heavily from Emily Brontë's earlier writings about a fictional land called Gondal, as well as from Walter Scott's novel Rob Roy. Critics were confused by the book's unusual structure, and its intense emotions and violent scenes led many readers and reviewers to believe it was written by a man. Juliet Gardiner noted that the novel's strong language and vivid descriptions of passion and power surprised and unsettled reviewers. Thomas Joudrey explained that readers expected a story similar to Jane Eyre, which focuses on personal growth, but instead encountered a tale filled with raw, untamed emotions and harsh cruelty. A critic in The Atlas described all the characters in the novel as "utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible." An anonymous reviewer in The Examiner also questioned the book's authorship.

Emily Brontë used a pseudonym to keep her identity private. After her death, Charlotte Brontë confirmed that Emily was the author of Wuthering Heights. However, two friends of Branwell Brontë claimed he had written the novel. An article in People's Magazine expressed disbelief that a woman could have written such a powerful and intense story.

A letter from Emily's publisher to Ellis Bell suggested she had started writing a second novel, but the manuscript has never been found. Some believe it was lost, while others think the letter may have been meant for Anne Brontë, who was already working on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Personality and character

Unlike Charlotte, who left behind many letters, very few of Emily's letters have survived. This, along with her quiet and private nature, has made it difficult for biographers to learn much about her life.

According to Lucasta Miller’s study of Brontë biographies, Charlotte "took on the role of Emily's first mythographer." Stevie Davies writes about what she calls "Charlotte's smoke-screen," and argues that Charlotte was surprised by Emily and may have questioned her sister's mental health. Charlotte admired Emily's talent, once calling her "a giant" and "a baby god," but did not fully understand her work. In the introduction to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte described Emily as "a native and nursling of the moors," who "did not know what she had done." After Emily's death, Charlotte changed details about her sister’s life, poems, and character, hoping to make her more acceptable to the public. In the Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights in 1850, Charlotte wrote:

With the exception of Ellen Nussey and Louise de Bassompierre, Emily’s fellow student in Brussels, there is no record of Emily having friends outside her family. There is no evidence that Emily was ever in love, or that the intense relationships in Wuthering Heights were based on personal experience. Emily’s closest friend was her sister Anne. As children, they created a shared fantasy world called Gondal, and they continued to enjoy it together as adults.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was the first and most influential source of information about Emily. Gaskell described Emily as unusually tall and slim, often wearing a purple dress, and having an "unconscious tyranny" over her sisters, who called her "the Major." She also shared stories that showed Emily as unpredictable, even violent at times, such as when Emily punished her dog, Keeper, for climbing on a bed with muddy paws, then later comforted and cleaned him. However, since Charlotte was Gaskell’s main source of information, the biography is not seen as completely fair, especially because Gaskell did not visit Haworth until after Emily’s death and admitted she disliked what she knew about her.

Emily is often described as strong-willed and independent. Constantin Heger spoke of her "powerful reason" and "strong, imperious will." Winifred Gerin’s biography describes her as physically brave, someone who carried a gun and once used a hot iron to treat a dog bite to avoid worrying her sisters. (Some biographers and scholars have questioned the truth of this story.) In Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era (1886), Eva Hope summarized Emily’s character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage." Norma Crandall noted that Emily’s "warm, human aspect" was "usually revealed only in her love of nature and of animals." The Literary News (1883) stated: "[Emily] loved the solemn moors, she loved all wild, free creatures and things."

Emily’s quiet and shy nature has led some to wonder about her mental health. Juliet Barker wrote in her biography of the Brontës that Emily "was so absorbed in herself and her literary creations that she had little time for the genuine suffering of her family." Claire Harman has suggested that Emily’s strict routines, difficulty managing anger, dislike of social situations, and strong attachment to her home may indicate she had a form of autism. Although Emily seemed to enjoy cooking and helping in the kitchen, John Sutherland mentioned her "obstinate fasting," and Katherine Frank suggested she may have suffered from anorexia.

Death

Emily's brother, Branwell, died, likely from tuberculosis, on Sunday, 24 September 1848. His death followed a long struggle with alcohol and drug use. A week later, at his funeral, Emily caught a severe cold that quickly turned into a lung infection, possibly worsening an existing illness like tuberculosis. Some believe Emily's health had been harmed by unhealthy living conditions at home, where water was polluted by runoff from the church's graveyard. Despite her worsening condition, Emily refused medical care, stating she would not allow a "poisoning doctor" to treat her. On the morning of 19 December 1848, Charlotte, worried about her sister, wrote:

By noon, Emily's health had worsened. In her final words, she told Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now," but it was too late. Emily died that day around 2:00 p.m. According to Mary Robinson, an early biographer, Emily passed away on the sofa in the living room at the Parsonage, which she had used as a bed. A letter from Charlotte to William Smith Williams describes Emily's dog, Keeper, lying by her deathbed. Emily died less than three months after Branwell's death, leading a housemaid, Martha Brown, to say, "Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother." Emily had become very thin, and her coffin was only 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide. The carpenter noted he had never made such a narrow coffin for an adult. Her body was buried in the family vault at St Michael and All Angels' Church, Haworth. In 2024, a memorial at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey was changed to correct a spelling mistake in the family name (from Bronte to Brontë).

Legacy

Although Emily's work was not widely appreciated when it was first published, Wuthering Heights has later become a classic in English literature. It is called in John Sutherland's Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction the "most popular 19th-century novel in the 20th century." In 2007, it won a poll by The Guardian as the nation's favorite love story. Emily's poems are also well known worldwide. The first line of her poem "No coward soul is mine" appears on mugs, key rings, and even as tattoos.

Many authors have been influenced by Emily Brontë, including Anne Rice, Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Wilson, Joanne Harris, Margaret Atwood, Kate Mosse, Dorothy Koomson, and Lucy Powrie (now the chair of the Brontë Society). In 2018, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Emily's birth, The Borough Press published a book of short stories titled I Am Heathcliff, edited by Kate Mosse. The stories were written by authors such as Leila Aboulela, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Joanna Cannon, Alison Case, Juno Dawson, Louise Doughty, Sophie Hannah, Anna James, Erin Kelly, Dorothy Koomson, Grace McCleen, Lisa McInerney, Laurie Penny, Nikesh Shukla, Michael Stewart, and Louisa Young.

Wuthering Heights has been adapted many times for radio, film, stage, and television, both in the UK and other countries. The first adaptation was a silent film made in 1920, directed by A. V. Bramble. Actors who have played Catherine Earnshaw include Merle Oberon, Anna Calder-Marshall, Juliette Binoche, and Rosemary Harris. Actors who have played Heathcliff include Sir Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes, and Tom Hardy. In 2025, Emma Rice introduced a stage musical version of Wuthering Heights in Sydney, with John Leader as Heathcliff. In 2026, a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights directed by Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, was released.

Many adaptations also show the Brontë sisters and their lives. The 1946 film Devotion was a fictionalized version of the Brontë sisters' lives. In the 1973 TV series The Brontës of Haworth, written by Christopher Fry, Emily was played by Rosemary McHale. In the 2019 film How to Build a Girl, Emily and Charlotte Brontë appear in a collage of historical figures. In the 2022 film Emily, written and directed by Frances O'Connor, Emma Mackey plays Emily Brontë before Wuthering Heights was published. The film mixes real facts with imagined stories.

In 2017, Catherynne Valente wrote The Glass House Game, which reimagines the Brontë siblings as characters in their own version of C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. In 2020, Isabel Greenberg made a graphic novel version of Glass Town, combining the Brontës' early stories with their own memories.

A 1967 BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights inspired the song "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush, released in 1978. In 1996, Cliff Richard created a stage musical called Heathcliff, in which he played the lead role. In 2019, the English folk group The Unthanks released Lines, three short albums featuring songs based on Brontë's poems. The music was recorded at the Brontës' home, using their Regency-era piano played by Adrian McNally. Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo set some of Emily Brontë's poems to music, using a chorus, string orchestra, and piano. This work was commissioned and first performed by the San Francisco Choral Society in Oakland and San Francisco. In the 1940s, composer Bernard Herrmann wrote an opera based on Wuthering Heights.

Works

• Bell, Currer; Bell, Ellis; Bell, Acton (1846). Poems.
• Bell, Ellis (1847). Wuthering Heights, a novel (1st edition). London: Thomas Cautley Newby. Emily Brontë as "Ellis Bell."
• Gezari, Janet, editor (1992). Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0140423524.