Who was Emily Bronte and why did she write only one novel?

Emily Jane Bronte was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of Patrick Bronte, an Irish clergyman, and Maria Branwell Bronte, who died of cancer when Emily was three. The family moved to Haworth when Emily was two, and she spent most of her short life on the edge of the Yorkshire moors that fill Wuthering Heights with their atmosphere of wild exposure.

She published one novel. She died at thirty.

The single novel is Wuthering Heights. Most critics consider it one of the greatest novels in the English language.

What was her life actually like?#

By the standards of any era, Emily Bronte's life was extremely confined. She left Haworth for school twice -- once at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge (which she and Charlotte both attended and where their elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis) and once to study in Brussels with Charlotte in 1842, where she went to improve her French and German in preparation for opening a school. She returned to Haworth after six months. She never left Yorkshire again.

She was deeply private -- more so than either Charlotte or Anne -- and destroyed most of her correspondence. What her inner life was like, beyond the poetry and the novel, is largely unknown. Charlotte, who survived her and edited her work posthumously, wrote about Emily in terms that suggest genuine awe mixed with incomprehension.

Emily kept a large, fierce mastiff named Keeper, who was devoted to her. She died of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848, refusing medical attention until it was far too late, and was seen walking the moors the day before she died.

Why did she write only one novel?#

She did not have the opportunity to write another. She began showing symptoms of tuberculosis in October 1848, the month after her brother Branwell died of it. She was dead by December.

She may also have been working on a second novel. There are references in Charlotte's correspondence and in other sources to manuscripts that no longer survive. Whether these were drafts of a second novel or other writing, and what happened to them, is unknown.

The single novel she completed is enough. Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, was unlike anything else published in that year or, arguably, in that decade. It was received with considerable confusion. Contemporary reviewers found it strange, violent, morally irregular, and difficult to classify. Charlotte Bronte, in her preface to the 1850 edition (published after Emily's death), tried to explain the novel to the public as the product of a powerful but untrained imagination -- an explanation that significantly underestimated what her sister had done.

What makes Wuthering Heights unlike other Victorian novels?#

Most Victorian novels, whatever their subject, operate within a recognisable moral framework. They have an implied narrator who knows where the values lie. They end with order restored or, if they end tragically, with the tragic outcome clearly marked as such.

Wuthering Heights does none of this. It has two unreliable narrators -- Nelly Dean and Lockwood -- whose accounts of Heathcliff and Catherine cannot be fully trusted. For the full analysis of how those unreliable narrators work and why they matter, that piece covers the critical landscape. The novel's moral universe is genuinely unclear: it is not obvious whether Heathcliff is a romantic hero, a monster, a victim, or all three simultaneously.

The moors -- which Emily knew with the intimacy of someone who had walked them every day of her adult life -- function as more than landscape. They are a moral and psychological environment, as capable of sheltering as of destroying.

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Further reading#

Wuthering Heights is free on Foxing.

For the full analysis of unreliable narration in the novel, what the unreliable narrator in Wuthering Heights means covers the critical debate.

For other Gothic novels from the same period, the best gothic novels in the public domain includes Wuthering Heights alongside Shelley, Stoker, and Stevenson.

Sources#

• Juliet Barker, The Brontes, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994
• Patsy Stoneman, Bronte Transformations, Prentice Hall, 1996
• Charlotte Bronte, "Editor's Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights," 1850