Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature.
Background
Emily Jane Brontë was born to Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell on 30th July 1818, in the Thornton village of Yorkshire, England. She had five siblings Maria, Elizabeth, Anne, Charlotte and Patrick Branwell.
In 1821, her family shifted to Haworth and a few months later, their mother died after suffering from cancer and left the children in a lonely state.
Education
When Emily was six-years-old, she joined the Clergy Daughters’ School located at Cowan Bridge, where her elder sisters Elizabeth, Maria and Charlotte were already enrolled at.
Her sisters Elizabeth and Maria fell ill after they caught some fatal disease which resulted in their deaths. After that, their father took Emily and Charlotte back home. There they were home-tutored by their father and their maternal aunt Elizabeth Branwell. The Bronte sisters, in spite of not having a formal education were provided with numerous books to read which consisted of writers such as Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, and Byron.
In 1835, Emily got enrolled at the Roe Head Girls’ School, where her sister Charlotte worked as a teacher. However, her longing to be back home, made her leave the school and return back home.
Career
Living in an isolated village, separated socially and intellectually from the local people, the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) and their brother Branwell gave themselves wholly to fantasy worlds, which they chronicled in poems and tales and in "magazines" written in miniature script on tiny pieces of paper. As the children matured, their personalities diverged. She and Anne created the realm of Gondal. Located somewhere in the north, it was, like the West Riding, a land of wild moors. Unlike Charlotte and Branwell's emotional dreamworld Angria, Gondal's psychological and moral laws reflected those of the real world. But this did not mean that she found it any easier than her sister to submit herself to the confined life of a governess or schoolmistress to which she seemed inevitably bound.
Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School in Halifax when she was twenty. But her health broke under the stress of the 17-hour work day and she returned home in April 1839. Thereafter she became the stay-at-home daughter, doing most of the cooking, ironing, and cleaning and teaching Sunday school.
In 1842 she accompanied Charlotte to Brussels for a year at school. During this time she impressed the master as having the finer, more powerful mind of the two. The isolation of Haworth meant for Brontë not frustration as for her sister, but the freedom of the open moors. Here she experienced the world in terms of elemental forces outside of conventional categories of good and evil. Her vision was essentially mystical, rooted in the experience of a supernatural power, which she expressed in poems such as "To Imagination," "The Prisoner," "The Visionary," "The Old Stoic," and "No Coward Soul."
Brontë's first publication consisted of poems contributed under the pseudonym Ellis Bell to a volume of verses (1846) in which she collaborated with Anne and Charlotte. These remained unnoticed, and Wuthering Heights (1847) was unfavorably received. Set in the moors, it is the story of the effect of a foundling named Heathcliff on two neighboring families. Loving and hating with elemental intensity, he impinges on the conventions of civilization with demonic power.
Brontë died of consumption on December 19, 1848. Refusing all medical attention, she struggled to perform her household tasks until the end.
Views
Quotations:
''Having levelled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home. ''
''Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living."
''The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them."
''I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.''
''Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.''
''A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad ... and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.''
Personality
Emily did not prefer much exposure to social world and as such details about her are lacking. She was a person who preferred to be at home and took delight in solitude.
Quotes from others about the person
On the morning of 19 December 1848, Charlotte, fearing for her sister, wrote this:
"She grows daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed too obscurely to be of use - he sent some medicine which she would not take. Moments so dark as these I have never known – I pray for God's support to us all."
Eva Hope summarises Emily's character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage", and goes on to say, "She was painfully shy, but physically she was brave to a surprising degree. She loved few persons, but those few with a passion of self-sacrificing tenderness and devotion. To other people's failings she was understanding and forgiving, but over herself she kept a continual and most austere watch, never allowing herself to deviate for one instant from what she considered her duty."