Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë was an English writer best known for her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. She also co-authored a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Emily was the fifth of six Brontë siblings, four of whom survived into adulthood. Her mother died when she was three, leaving the children in the care of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Apart from brief intervals at school, Emily was mostly taught at home by her father, Patrick Brontë, who was the curate of Haworth. She was very close to her siblings, especially her younger sister Anne, and together they wrote little books and journals depicting imaginary worlds. She was described by her sister Charlotte as solitary, strong-willed and nonconforming, with a keen love of nature and animals.
Apart from a brief period at school, and another as a student and teacher in Brussels with her sister Charlotte, Emily spent most of her life at home in Haworth, helping the family servant with chores, playing the piano and teaching herself from books.
Her work was originally published under the pen name Ellis Bell. It was not generally admired at the time, and many critics felt that the characters in Wuthering Heights were coarse and immoral. In spite of this, the novel is now considered to be a classic of English literature. Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, a year after its publication.
Early life
Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to Maria Branwell, the daughter of a wealthy Penzance merchant and property owner, and Patrick Brontë, a curate from an impoverished Irish family. The Brontë family lived in Market Street, in Thornton, a village on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Their house is now open to the public and is known as the Brontë Birthplace.Emily was the fifth of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Branwell. In 1820, Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Soon after Anne's birth, the family moved away to the village of Haworth, in the Pennines, where Patrick Brontë took employment as perpetual curate. Haworth was a small community with an unusually high early mortality rate. In 1850, Benjamin Herschel Babbage reported deeply insanitary conditions, including contamination to the village water supply from the overcrowded graveyard nearby. This is believed to have had a serious impact on the health of Emily and her siblings.Cowan Bridge school
On 15 September 1821, Maria Branwell died, after a long illness which her nurse believed to have been uterine cancer. Her sister, Elizabeth Branwell, had joined the household to nurse her, and made the move permanent to care for the three-year-old Emily and her siblings. Elizabeth Branwell was not especially maternal, taking her meals alone, as did Patrick Brontë. She is portrayed as a stern disciplinarian in Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë, but Nick Holland states in his biography of her that she also had an affectionate and supportive side.In 1824, Emily and her three elder sisters were sent to the newly opened Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At her admission, the school register said of Emily that she "reads very prettily, and works a little". At six years old, she was the youngest student, and the superintendent described her as "quite the pet nursling of the school". The children suffered severe privations at Cowan Bridge, including poor and insufficient food, unsanitary conditions, harsh discipline and frequent outbreaks of infectious disease such as typhoid and tuberculosis. In 1825, following an outbreak of typhoid fever, Maria and Elizabeth both fell ill, and were sent home, where they died of tuberculosis within three months of one other. After this, Charlotte and Emily were brought back to Haworth by their father. The children were subsequently educated at home, and were cared for by their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, who had given up her plans to return to Penzance, and the house servant, Tabby Ackroyd.
Early influences
The Brontë children were encouraged by their father and aunt to develop their literary talents and to take an interest in politics and current affairs. Girls were not allowed access to the public library, but Branwell borrowed books which he shared with his sisters, and Patrick Brontë had a large personal library, to which he allowed his children access. Thus Emily and her siblings read a wide range of published material, including books, periodicals and magazines. Favourites included: Aesop's Fables, the Arabian Nights, Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather and Blackwood's Magazine, as well as Oliver Goldsmith's A History of England and J. Goldsmith's A Grammar of General Geography. In 1833 or 1834 Patrick Brontë bought a piano, and Emily became proficient in its use. The Brontë children were also tutored in drawing and painting, as well as in Latin and Classics. They were familiar with the work of Thomas Bewick and John Martin, the engravings of William Finden, and illustrations from The Literary Souvenir. Twenty-nine drawings and paintings by Emily are known to have survived, including a watercolour painting of her dog, Keeper.In spite of his desire for his children to receive as comprehensive an education as possible, Patrick Brontë himself was cold and emotionally distant, and exhibited a number of marked eccentricities, such as carrying a loaded gun at all times and imposing a number of idiosyncratic personal rules on the household. Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte depicts him as prone to violent rages, once cutting up a dress belonging to his wife because he felt it encouraged vanity, and forbidding his children to eat meat in case it made them too dependent on their physical comfort, although Patrick himself denied this, and Gaskell's account is now generally considered to have been an exaggeration. He had retained an Irish accent, which the siblings shared as children, and this contributed to the perception that they were outsiders, never quite fitting into the Yorkshire community. A local woman later told Elizabeth Gaskell that the Brontë children had no friends in the village, and on one occasion when they were invited to a party, showed no knowledge of the games played by their peers. Left to their own devices, the siblings were unusually close, and remained so, especially Emily and Anne, who were described by a family friend, Ellen Nussey, as being "like twins".
Juvenilia
Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell Brontë had received as a gift from his father, the children began to write stories, which they set in the complex imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria. These stories, which became increasingly detailed, were initially populated by these soldiers as well as their real-life heroes, the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. The siblings created tiny books for the soldiers to "read", some of which are on display at the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, and, in December 1827 they produced a novel, Glass Town. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters.When Emily was thirteen, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives. With the exception of their Gondal poems and Anne's lists of Gondal's characters and place names, Emily and Anne's Gondal writings were largely not preserved. Among those that did survive are some "diary papers", written by Emily in her twenties, which describe current events in Gondal. The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage". The tales of Gondal also feature a queen called Augusta Geraldine Almeda, whose character bears some similarities with that of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. Similar themes of romanticism and noble savagery are apparent across the Brontës' juvenilia, including in Branwell's The Life of Alexander Percy, which tells the story of an all-consuming, death-defying, and ultimately self-destructive love, and which some believe may have been one of the inspirations for Wuthering Heights.Adulthood
Attempted teaching career
At seventeen, Emily joined the Roe Head Girls' School, where Charlotte was a teacher. This was the first time Emily had attended school since her few months at Cowan Bridge. At this time, the girls' objective was to obtain sufficient education to open a small school of their own. Emily struggled to adapt to life at Roe Head and left after only a few months, with Anne taking her place. Later, Charlotte ascribed this to Emily's extreme homesickness and resistance to the routine and discipline of the school, stating that she feared Emily would have died if she had not been allowed home.In September 1838, when she was twenty, Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School, in the Yorkshire town of Halifax. Her health suffered under the stress of the seventeen-hour workday, and she did not warm to her pupils, stating that she preferred the company of the house dog. She did, however, continue writing, and produced several poems during this time. She returned home to Haworth in April 1839, helping the family's servant with the cooking, ironing, and cleaning. She taught herself German from books and played the piano, becoming an accomplished pianist, as well as continuing to expand her Gondal stories. These survive as a series of poems, many of which reflect her interest in the tragic, Byronic figures that precede the creation of Heathcliff.Brussels
In 1842, when she was twenty-four, Emily accompanied Charlotte to study at the Heger Pensionnat, a girls' boarding school in Brussels, where Charlotte hoped to spend six months improving her French, Italian and German. Charlotte's further plan was for them to seek employment abroad, although she only shared this plan with Emily. Their tuition and travel expenses had been paid by their Aunt Branwell, and some friends of the family, the Jenkinses, had promised to look out for their well-being. The Jenkins family were initially welcoming but soon ceased to invite the sisters, finding Charlotte to be socially awkward and Emily monosyllabic.Nor did Charlotte and Emily fit in easily at the school: they were considerably older than their peers, they struggled with lessons that were held in French, and they were in a very small minority of Protestants in the Pensionnat. Unlike Charlotte, who made an effort to be accepted, and changed her style of dress to fit in better with her peers, Emily was not happy in Brussels and was mocked by the other students for her refusal to adopt Belgian fashions. A fellow-student, Laetitia Wheelwright, said of her:
I simply disliked her from the first; her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure... always answering our jokes with 'I wish to be as God made me'.
Constantin Heger, who was in charge of the academy, thought highly of Emily, later telling Mrs Gaskell that he rated her intellect as "something even higher" than Charlotte's, saying:
She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.Fewer than a dozen of Emily's French essays survive from this period, most of which are compositions based on existing literary works selected by Constantin Heger. The two sisters were committed to their studies and by the end of the term had become so competent in French that Madame Heger, the wife of Constantin Heger, proposed that they both stay another half-year. According to Charlotte, she even offered to dismiss the English master so that Charlotte could take his place. By this time, Emily had become a competent pianist and teacher, and it was suggested that she might stay on to teach music. In this way, the sisters would be able to continue their education at the Pensionnat 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 intensely. Laetitia Wheelwright later said that this was because Emily refused to teach the small children during her own school hours, thereby monopolizing their play time. In spite of this, Emily seems to have been happier during this period, and even made a friend; a sixteen-year-old Belgian student, Louise de Bassompierre, to whom Emily gifted a signed drawing.
Unfortunately, the sudden illness and death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, forced the sisters' return to Haworth. A letter from Constantin Heger to Patrick Brontë, appealing for the girls to remain, reveals that Emily was about to receive music lessons from a celebrated teacher, and was finally overcoming her social awkwardness. In spite of this, she remained in Haworth to take over the running of the household, while Charlotte returned to Brussels without her. In 1844, on Charlotte's return, the sisters attempted to open a school at the Parsonage, but the venture failed when they proved unable to attract students to the remote area.