A short life of the author
Emily Jane Brontë (1818–1848) was born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, an Anglo-Irish clergyman, and Maria Branwell Brontë, who died of cancer when Emily was three. The family moved to the parsonage at Haworth in 1820, on the edge of the Yorkshire moors — the wild, treeless upland that became the landscape of Emily’s imagination and the setting of Wuthering Heights.
Life and Career
The Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne — created elaborate imaginary worlds as children: Charlotte and Branwell invented Angria, while Emily and Anne created the kingdom of Gondal, a saga of war, passion, and betrayal set on a fictional island in the North Pacific. Emily wrote Gondal poems throughout her life; they are among the finest narrative poems of the nineteenth century.
Emily’s attempts to live away from Haworth were brief and agonising. She spent three months at Roe Head School in 1835 before returning home, physically ill with homesickness. She briefly studied at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels with Charlotte in 1842, but returned after the death of her aunt. She spent the rest of her short life at the parsonage, walking the moors, writing, and caring for the household — including her brother Branwell, whose alcoholism and opium addiction cast a shadow over the family’s final years.
In 1846, Charlotte discovered Emily’s private notebook of poems and insisted they be published. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) — the sisters published under male pseudonyms to avoid the condescension directed at women writers — sold two copies. Emily then wrote Wuthering Heights, which was published in December 1847 (the title page reads 1848) by Thomas Cautley Newby as the first two volumes of a three-volume set, with Anne’s Agnes Grey as the third volume.
Emily contracted tuberculosis — probably at Branwell’s funeral in September 1848 — and died on 19 December 1848, aged thirty. She refused all medical attention and famously insisted on feeding the dogs and climbing the stairs on the morning of her death.
Major Works and Themes
Wuthering Heights is a novel like no other. The story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff — a love so absolute and destructive that it transcends death — is told through a complex narrative frame (Lockwood, the tenant, hears the story from Nelly Dean, the housekeeper) that gives the wild passions of the central narrative a documentary solidity. The novel is simultaneously a Gothic romance, a social novel about class and property, a meditation on nature and civilisation, and a metaphysical love story that refuses every consolation.
Catherine’s declaration — “I am Heathcliff” — is the novel’s spiritual centre: an assertion of identity so radical that it dissolves the boundaries between self and other. Heathcliff, the foundling of uncertain race who returns from mysterious years of absence to destroy everyone who wronged him, is the most powerful figure in Victorian fiction — demonic, sympathetic, and ultimately incomprehensible.
The novel’s structure is daringly complex: two generations, two houses (Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange), two narrators, and a chronology that loops and doubles back on itself. It was far ahead of its time.
Emily’s poetry — particularly “No coward soul is mine,” “Remembrance,” and the Gondal poems — is of the highest quality: passionate, formally accomplished, and shot through with a visionary intensity that anticipates nothing in Victorian literature and everything in modernism.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Wuthering Heights was poorly received on publication. Critics found it powerful but repellent — “too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable,” wrote one reviewer. Charlotte Brontë, in her preface to the 1850 second edition, tried to explain and apologise for her sister’s wild vision.
The novel’s reputation grew steadily through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is now universally recognised as one of the supreme achievements of English fiction — a novel that stands apart from the realist tradition of Austen, Dickens, and Eliot and speaks to the Romantic and Gothic traditions with unmatched intensity.
Key Works
- Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846)
- Wuthering Heights (1847)
Collecting Brontë
Emily Brontë first editions are among the rarest and most valuable items in Victorian literature.
Wuthering Heights (1847, Thomas Cautley Newby, London) was published as the first two volumes of a three-volume set, with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey as volume three. The title page is dated 1848 (publication was December 1847). First editions in the original boards are of extreme rarity — very few copies survive in anything like original condition. Complete three-volume sets with Agnes Grey have sold for $200,000–$500,000 at auction. Even individual volumes command substantial prices.
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846, Aylott and Jones, London), the joint poetry collection, was published in an edition of about 1,000 copies, of which only two were sold. The remainder were eventually bound and sold as remainders. First editions bring $10,000–$50,000 depending on condition and binding state.
Emily Brontë autograph material is of almost incalculable rarity. Fewer letters by Emily survive than by almost any other major English writer — perhaps fewer than ten. Any Brontë autograph item that reached the market would be a major event commanding extraordinary prices. The major Brontë collections are at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the British Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.