Emily Brontë

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Standard Name: Brontë, Emily
Birth Name: Emily Brontë
Pseudonym: Ellis Bell
Used Form: Emily Bronte
Used Form: Two
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.
Charlotte Brontë painted with her sisters Emily and Anne by their brother Branwell, c. 1834 (said by Elizabeth Gaskell to have captured excellent likenesses despite its lack of artistic skill). National Portrait Gallery.
Painting of Emily Brontë in a green dress with large collar, cropped from the group portrait by her brother Branwell, c. 1834, of all three sisters (and of himself, painted over). The picture was long lost to view, and has crease marks from being folded. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Anita Desai
Anita grew up with Urdu poetry and literature, but her nursery rhymes were German. Her father did not pass Bengali on to his children.
Desai, Kiran. “In conversation: Kiran Desai meets Anita Desai”. Guardian.co.uk.
When at the age of nine she read Emily BrontëWuthering Heights...
Education Jackie Kay
In her early years at school in Glasgow, JK had problems with bullies who taunted her because of her skin colour. She retaliated privately by writing little poems of revenge.
“Writer’s ’revenge’ on school bullies”. BBC News.
At school she was...
Education L. M. Montgomery
LMM attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...
Education Jean Plaidy
Eleanor Alice Burford (later JP ) learned how to read at four years old: I do feel that books were my thing, right from the word go, she told an interviewer in 1991.
Bennett, Catherine. “The Prime of Miss Jean Plaidy”. The Guardian, pp. 23-4.
23
She...
Education Mary Gawthorpe
Apprenticeship included some part-time attendance at the Pupil-Teacher Centre in the LeedsSchool Board offices. There MG continued with largely the same subjects as at school, with the addition of French, educational theory, psychology, and...
Education Agatha Christie
By the time Agatha was born, Clara Miller believed that girls ought not to learn to read before the age of eight. Defiantly, Agatha taught herself to read at five. She eagerly devoured Lewis Carroll
Education Jean Rhys
At a very young age, JR imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...
Education H. D.
HD's father encouraged her education, although he refused to allow her to attend art school. Instead, she was encouraged to study mathematics and was tutored by her brother Eric . Eric also provided his sister...
Education Flora Macdonald Mayor
Although FMM 's father was, for the most part, more concerned with her fragile health than her academic development, the twin sisters received some home-schooling from their mother to quite a high level, since she...
Education Carson McCullers
About this time she was reading voraciously: theBrontësisters , Russian novelists and dramatists, and British and American modernists including Katherine Mansfield and Gertrude Stein . Isak Dinesen was to come later.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Doubleday and Co. Inc.
33
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
808
Education Jessie Fothergill
She acquired much knowledge through her voracious consumption of books: I loved books, and read all that I could get hold of, and have had many a rebuke for poring over those books instead of...
Education F. Tennyson Jesse
Though FTJ did not receive much formal education, she read voraciously. Important discoveries were theBrontësisters , Jane Austen , and Constance Garnett 's translations of Tolstoy .
Colenbrander, Joanna. A Portrait of Fryn. A. Deutsch.
33
Family and Intimate relationships Emma Frances Brooke
It appears that EFB had at least two sisters, and that they may have both been writers. An article written after EFB revealed her authorship of A Superfluous Woman quotes her still undiscovered biographer: There...
Family and Intimate relationships Dora Sigerson
She had met him through Katharine Tynan, and they became engaged in September 1895 after a long courtship. Their loving marriage lasted the rest of Dora's life. They never had children.
Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. Smith, Elder.
240
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Shorter worked for...
Family and Intimate relationships Dora Carrington
Their friendship was at first somewhat shaky, but warmed considerably. Writing in her diary on 6 June 1918, Woolf described DC as such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same...

Timeline

14 September 1767: Midwife Elizabeth Brownrigg was hanged at...

Building item

14 September 1767

Midwife Elizabeth Brownrigg was hanged at Tyburn (in London near the present Marble Arch) for the murder of Mary Clifford , a workhouse apprentice.

1840: Thomas Cautley Newby established himself...

Writing climate item

1840

Thomas Cautley Newby established himself as a publisher in London; he earned notoriety for failing to honour contracts, especially with new writers.

1880: Sabine Baring-Gould's novel Mehalah, published...

Writing climate item

1880

Sabine Baring-Gould 's novelMehalah, published this year, was compared by Swinburne to Emily Brontë 's Wuthering Heights.

April 1972: Daffodils in Ice, first of three volumes...

Women writers item

April 1972

Daffodils in Ice, first of three volumes of poetry by Sister Mary Agnes , was published with a foreword by novelist Elizabeth Goudge .

10 September 2003: Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of...

Writing climate item

10 September 2003

Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.

December 2004: An early nineteenth-century flintlock box-lock...

Building item

December 2004

An early nineteenth-century flintlock box-lock pocket pistol . . . with a spring bayonet below the barrel, once owned by the Rev. Patrick Brontë fetched £24,000 at auction.

Texts

Brontë, Emily. A Selection of Poems by Emily Brontë. Editor Spark, Muriel, Grey Walls Press, 1952.
Brontë, Anne, and Emily Brontë. Agnes Grey. T. C. Newby, 1847.
Brontë, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell; Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Wuthering Heights</span>; Extract from the Prefatory Note to ’Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell’”. Wuthering Heights, edited by Professor Ian Jack and Professor Ian Jack, Oxford University Press, 1981, pp. 359 - 65; 365.
Sinclair, May, and Emily Brontë. “Introduction”. Wuthering Heights, Dent; Dutton, 1907.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, edited by Charles William Hatfield, Columbia University Press, 1941, pp. 3-13.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. Gondal’s Queen, edited by Fannie E. Ratchford, University of Texas Press, 1955, pp. 11-38.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. The Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Barbara Lloyd-Evans, Batsford, 1992, pp. 7-13.
Brontë, Emily. “Introduction”. The Poems of Emily Brontë, edited by Derek Roper, Clarendon, 1995, pp. 1-29.
Brontë, Charlotte et al. Poems. Aylott and Jones, 1846.
Brontë, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë. Editor Hatfield, Charles William, Columbia University Press, 1941.
Brontë, Emily. The Poems of Emily Brontë. Editors Roper, Derek and Edward Chitham, Clarendon, 1995.
Brontë, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Wuthering Heights. T. C. Newby, 1847.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Editor Jack, Professor Ian, Oxford University Press, 1981.
Brontë, Emily et al. Wuthering Heights; and, Agnes Grey. Smith, Elder, 1850.