Emily Bronte Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Emily Jane Bronte was born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, the fifth of six children of Patrick Bronte, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, and Maria Branwell Bronte. In 1820 the family settled in Haworth, where Patrick served as perpetual curate and where the stark beauty of the surrounding moors became a lasting presence in Emily's imagination. After Maria Branwell's death in 1821, the Bronte children were raised by their father and their maternal aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, whose frugal discipline and steady guidance helped keep the household together. The siblings formed a close, intense circle: the elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, the only brother Branwell, and the youngest, Anne. The household also included the longtime servant Tabitha Aykroyd, whose stories and Yorkshire speech imprinted themselves on the children's ears.

Education and Formative Years
In 1824 Emily joined her sisters at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, a severe experience later transmuted by Charlotte into Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Illness swept the school; Maria and Elizabeth returned home gravely sick and died in 1825, a tragedy that marked the family and brought Charlotte and Emily back to Haworth. There, under Patrick's watchful eye and Aunt Branwell's care, the children educated themselves with a mixture of reading, writing, and imaginative play. Charlotte and Branwell created the world of Angria, while Emily and Anne collaborated on the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, composing prose narratives and poems that trained Emily's ear for cadence and her sense of dramatic voice. The parsonage library, the sermons and classical texts that Patrick valued, and the endless walking on the moors supplied both discipline and freedom. Emily learned languages and music, read British and continental literature, and developed an inner life at once solitary and ardent.

Governess and Teaching Work
Like her sisters, Emily tried to make a living as a teacher and governess, working for a period at Law Hill School near Halifax in 1838. The demands of institutional life, long hours, and fragile health made the position untenable, and she returned to Haworth. These experiences deepened her distrust of conventional respectability and sharpened her sympathy for those constrained by class and circumstance. At home she resumed the rhythm that suited her: housework, music, long walks, and private writing. Her father depended on her practical steadiness, and the household relied on her competence as much as on Aunt Branwell's thrift.

Brussels and Plans for a School
In 1842 Emily and Charlotte traveled to Brussels to study languages at the Pensionnat Heger, seeking credentials for a future school of their own in Haworth. Under the instruction of Constantin Heger, Emily showed rigorous intelligence and a stubborn independence of mind. The death of Aunt Elizabeth Branwell in October 1842 forced both sisters back to Haworth. Charlotte later returned to Brussels; Emily stayed home for good. The school they hoped to open never took root, partly for lack of pupils and partly because Emily's nature fit Haworth and its moors far better than any enterprise that required social solicitation.

Poetry and the Bell Pseudonyms
Emily's earliest surviving work of power is her poetry: intense, formally controlled, and animated by metaphysical conviction and stark clarity. In 1845, Charlotte discovered a private notebook of Emily's poems and pressed her to consider publication. The sisters adopted masculine pseudonyms to shield their privacy and to avoid prejudice: Charlotte became Currer Bell, Emily Ellis Bell, and Anne Acton Bell. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appeared in 1846 with the publisher Aylott and Jones. Sales were meager, but reviewers noticed the vigor in Ellis Bell's voice. Emily's poems, including pieces later titled No Coward Soul Is Mine and Remembrance, reveal her obstinate spiritual courage and her keen sense of loss, endurance, and joy amid severity.

Wuthering Heights
Encouraged by the poetic venture, the sisters sought publishers for their prose. In 1847 Thomas Cautley Newby brought out Wuthering Heights, attributed to Ellis Bell, in a three-volume format paired with Anne's Agnes Grey, while Charlotte's Jane Eyre appeared with Smith, Elder and Co. Wuthering Heights confounded many early readers. Its structure employs layered narrators, including the outsider Mr. Lockwood and the housekeeper Nelly Dean, to recount a tale of ferocious attachment between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, set against the elemental weather and social gradations of the Yorkshire moors. The novel's violence, moral ambiguity, and dialect gave it an unsettling originality. Some critics condemned its harshness; others glimpsed a rare imaginative force. Emily kept her anonymity, letting controversy swirl around the work while she remained at Haworth, writing little for the press and declining to court literary society. After her death, Charlotte prepared a new edition in 1850 with a biographical notice that revealed the sisters' true names and helped secure Emily's reputation.

Character and Daily Life
Those who knew Emily described her as reserved, self-reliant, and fiercely principled. Patrick Bronte relied on her composure, and Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell felt both the strength and the mystery of her attachment to home. A capable pianist, Emily also excelled at domestic tasks; accounts emphasize her bread baking and her readiness to shoulder household burdens without complaint. She cared deeply for animals, forming a notable bond with the family dog, Keeper, and found restorative power in solitary walks over the moors. The landscape was not a backdrop but a shaping presence in her inner life, reflected in the austere grandeur of her imagery and the moral weather of her fiction and verse. Friends of the family, including Ellen Nussey, left glimpses of a woman who avoided display, distrusted cant, and spoke sparingly yet with force when principle required it.

Family Ties and Strain
The Bronte circle was both sustaining and fraught. Branwell's artistic ambitions faltered, and his struggles with addiction and disappointment brought distress to the household. Charlotte's growing literary success after Jane Eyre complicated the sisters' shared anonymity, even as she continued to champion Emily's genius. Anne's gentler temperament and collaborative bond with Emily shaped the Gondal poems and provided mutual solace. Patrick's long ministry and exacting standards gave the children a framework of duty and intellectual seriousness; Aunt Branwell's savings, carefully husbanded, had made possible the sisters' schooling and the trip to Brussels. The parsonage thus combined privation with cultural aspiration, producing, in its narrow rooms, work of startling breadth.

Illness and Death
In September 1848 Branwell Bronte died, and grief enveloped the family. Emily soon fell ill, exhibiting symptoms consistent with tuberculosis. She resisted medical attention, convinced she could master the illness by sheer will. Frail yet adamant, she continued her routines as long as she could. On 19 December 1848, at Haworth Parsonage, Emily Bronte died at the age of 30. She was buried in the Bronte family vault at the parish church of St Michael and All Angels, within sight of the moors that had shaped her life and art. Anne, already ill, followed her to the grave in 1849; Charlotte and Patrick endured more years of loss before Charlotte's own death in 1855.

Legacy
Emily Bronte left a slender body of work: one novel and a cluster of poems. Yet its singular power has secured her a central place in English literature. Victorian reviewers wavered between admiration and shock; later readers recognized in Wuthering Heights a radical exploration of passion, memory, class, and the costs of social exclusion. Charlotte's editorial work in 1850, though it altered some features of the text, helped bring Emily's authorship into public view, and critics gradually acknowledged the novel's formal daring and psychological depth. The moorland setting, the polyphonic narration, and the unsentimental moral vision continue to influence novelists, poets, and critics. Emily's life, anchored by Patrick Bronte's parsonage, steadied by Aunt Branwell, entangled with Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell, and observed by friends such as Ellen Nussey, is inseparable from the art she produced. Her voice, shielded in life by the name Ellis Bell, emerged after death as unmistakably her own: austere, capacious, and enduring.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Emily, under the main topics: Justice - Friendship - Deep - Free Will & Fate - Faith.

Other people realated to Emily: Georges Bataille (Writer)