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
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Brontë
AB 's elder sisters were Maria (born in 1814), Elizabeth , (1815), Charlotte , (1816), and Emily (1818).
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
59, 61, 71, 78
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Brontë
The close of the year 1848 was terrible for AB . Her sister Emily died of consumption on 19 December, as had Branwell in September.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
576
Textual Production Anne Brontë
Although some of the collaboratively produced juvenilia of the Brontë children is still extant, none has survived that was individually authored by AB .
Chitham, Edward. A Life of Anne Brontë. B. Blackwell.
5
In their childhood play which developed into the fantasy worlds...
Textual Production Anne Brontë
Charlotte , Emily , and Anne published a collection, Poems, under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Bell was the middle name of their father's curate.
Gérin, Winifred. Emily Brontë: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
185
They received their first copies on...
Literary responses Anne Brontë
On 4 July 1846 two anonymous reviews of Poems by Currer , Ellis and Acton Bell appeared, one mildly positive by Sydney Dobell in the Athenæum, and one enthusiastic in the Critic. A...
Publishing Anne Brontë
The novel was accepted for publication by the London publisher Thomas Cautley Newby along with Emily 's Wuthering Heights. The sisters had to underwrite the publication by paying £50, to be refunded if sales...
Reception Anne Brontë
An anonymous reviewer of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights in The Spectator for 18 December 1847 commented that the work of all three Charlotte BrontëEmily BrontëBrontë s suffered from injudicious selection of the theme and matter.
Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
218
Literary responses Anne Brontë
The novel was reviewed immediately by The Spectator and the Athenæum. The former accused the author of a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal, and objected to the coarseness of...
Occupation Charlotte Brontë
Patrick Brontë opened a National Church Sunday School at Haworth, to which Emily , and Anne , and CB contributed by teaching.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
183
Textual Production Charlotte Brontë
CB had begun creating plays with her siblings: both secret Bed plays produced under the covers with Emily in their shared bed, and daytime plays involving Branwell and Anne as well.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
151
Reception Charlotte Brontë
CB travelled to London with her sister Anne to refute the claim that Currer , Ellis , and Acton Bell were a single author.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. St Martin’s Press.
557
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...
Textual Production Emma Frances Brooke
It seems that EFB began writing seriously for financial reasons after her sudden loss of fortune and her move south to Hampstead in London in 1879.
Edwards, Joseph, editor. The First Labour Annual 1895: A Year Book of Industrial Progress and Social Welfare. No. 1, The Harvester Press.
163
Daniels, Kay. “Emma Brooke: Fabian, feminist and writer”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
12
, No. 2, pp. 153-68.
156-7
She officially adopted authorship as her profession...
Intertextuality and Influence A. S. Byatt
Charlotte Brontë 's poem We wove a web in childhood appears as epigraph, along with a sentence from Coleridge about the serpent as emblem of the imagination.
Byatt, A. S. The Game. Chatto and Windus.
4
Both web and serpent are ominous. This...
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...

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