2.8.1: Emily Brontë Biography
- Page ID
- 190029
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Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, the three surviving of the five daughters born to the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell, were early on inspired to climb to Olympian heights as poets and writers. The family’s economic ambitions centered on Branwell, the only son, who took advantage of the privileges given to Victorian males. Yet he recognized and shared in his sisters’ imaginative power and ambitions.
Branwell’s collection of tin soldiers and figurines of Turkish musicians and Indians led to their all creating, peopling, and chronicling the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondol. Emily’s writings associated with these kingdoms, especially Gondol, are rife with contemporary figures drawn from newspapers and magazines such as Blackwell’s, as well as Romantic and Byronic figures drawn from histories, novels, and romances found in their father’s library. All of the Bronte sisters incorporated Romanticism into their poems and novels. Yet their work also displays Victorian concerns. Emily’s especially deal with the Victorian Crisis of Faith with her original and self-actuating—almost supernatural—spiritual vision. And her sharp focus on the natural environment is heightened by the Industrial Revolution’s depredations.
In 1845, Charlotte discovered a notebook of Emily’s poems and convinced Emily to publish them. Charlotte, Emily, and Ann collected their poems and published them at their own expense in Poems (1846). They used the gender-neutral pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It was followed a year later by Wuthering Heights, published by Thomas Newby. The novel’s affinities with Emily’s poems are clear in its tone of yearning, nature imagery, and titanic characterizations.
In 1848, Emily died of tuberculosis, having seen the mixed success of her work. To bolster its sales, Newby deliberately confused Wuthering Heights with Jane Eyre (1847). Possibly affected by the negative reception of some aspects of Jane Eyre, including what was deemed as its irreligious attack on the clergy in her depiction of Brocklehurst at Lowood School, Charlotte later mythologized her sister to some extent, smoothing her “coarseness” and censoring her revolutionary spiritual vision.
Nevertheless, Emily’s distinctive, lyrical, and powerful voice speaks out for itself.
