Emily Brontë

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Emily Brontë collaborated with her siblings on a body of juvenilia, and by herself wrote a small number of poems and a single surviving novel. Wuthering Heights is established as one of the most original and disturbing novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Its compelling imagery, sophisticated narrative technique, and powerful, indeed violent, story—part ghost story, part romance, part anatomy of social hierarchies and cultural conflict—details the enmity between two families on the Yorkshire moors that erupts when a strange child is adopted into one of them, and which is only resolved in the subsequent generation.

Milestones

30 July 1818

Emily Brontë , the fourth of the Brontë daughters, was born in Thornton, near Bradford in Yorkshire.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
78

Earlier 1830s

By the mid-1830s, Anne and EB were writing into being the world of Gondal, though no prose narratives from before 1838 survive.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
235

Mid-July 1847

Anne and EB arranged with Thomas Newby to publish Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights; they had to pay him £50 towards costs.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
525

19 December 1848

EB died of consumption at the age of thirty, at Haworth in Yorkshire.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
576

September 1850

Sydney Thompson Dobell 's anonymous Palladium notice initiated a positive critical view of Wuthering Heights, declaring it the unformed writing of a giant's hand; the large utterance of a baby god.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
277-83

Biography

Birth and Context

30 July 1818

Emily Brontë , the fourth of the Brontë daughters, was born in Thornton, near Bradford in Yorkshire.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
78