BRONTE, Emily

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”

Emily Bronte was a novelist and poet with her only novel Wuthering Heights securing her a place in English Literature’s canon. She was the third eldest out of the iconic literary Bronte siblings and wrote under the pseudonym Ellis Bell.

After the early deaths of her mother and two elder sisters, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne were all educated at home by their father and aunt and had access to a wide range of published material. The siblings famously created their own fantasy worlds including ‘Angria’ to house their own stories and poetry. When Emily was thirteen, she and Anne withdrew from ‘Angria’ in order to establish another called ‘Gondal’. Records from Emily’s diaries tell us she was still incorporating ‘Gondal’ in her work at age twenty-seven but very little of the works themselves have survived. Some of her ‘Gondal’ poems were incorporated into Poems by Curer, Ellis, and Acton Bell which included 21 poems each by Emily and Anne and 19 poems by Charlotte.

Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 appearing as the first two volumes of a three-volume set which included Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey. Unfortunately Emily was never to know the impact her novel would have in English literature, as she died only a year after its publication. The impact the novel had has been enormous, inspiring not only film, operatic and radio adaptations but also a song by Kate Bush.