Emily Bronte

1818 - 1848

The most introspective and intellectually challenging of the Brontës. She was briefly educated at the Cowan Bridge School and later at Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head. But she always disliked being away from her home at Haworth. In 1842 she traveled to Brussels with Charlotte to study music and foreign languages, but she returned as soon as she could. She and Anne began the Gondal saga in 1831 and both of them continued to develop the Gondal narratives for virtually their whole adult lives. Very little information about Emily has come down to us, but it is clear that she was a widely read and deeply meditative writer. She was almost always underestimated by contemporaries, though Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a noble exception. Much of the fascinating poetry she included in the Gondal narratives, together with poetry in her own voice, establish her as one of the more compelling poets of the period. She lived to write only one novel, Wuthering Heights, a brilliant achievement, far surpassing in its moral, philosophical, and aesthetic complexity the crudely romantic fiction with which it is conventionally associated.

Texts

Reader's Role in WH ( doc | pdf )
McKibben ( doc | pdf )
Wuthering Heights Dreams ( doc | pdf )