186- ] English Literature

186- ] English Literature

Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë (/ˈbrɒnti/, commonly /-teɪ/; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Early life

 Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 to Maria Branwell and an Irish father, Patrick Brontë. The family was living on Market Street, in a house now known as the Brontë Birthplace in the village of Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Emily was the second youngest of six siblings, preceded by Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Branwell. In 1820, Emily's younger sister Anne, the last Brontë child, was born. Shortly thereafter, the family moved eight miles away to Haworth, where Patrick was employed as perpetual curate. In Haworth, the children would have opportunities to develop their literary talents. Emily's three elder sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte were sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge. At the age of six, on 25 November 1824, Emily joined her sisters at school for a brief period.[6] At school, however, the children suffered abuse and privations, and when a typhoid epidemic swept the school, Maria and Elizabeth became ill. Maria, who may actually have had tuberculosis, was sent home, where she died. Elizabeth died shortly after.

The four youngest Brontë children, all under ten years of age, had suffered the loss of the three eldest women in their immediate family.

Charlotte maintained that the school's poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development and that it had hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died in 1825. After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school.[8] Charlotte would use her experiences and knowledge of the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre. When Emily was only three, and all six children under the age of eight, she and her siblings lost their mother, Maria, to cancer on 15 September 1821. The younger children were to be cared for by Elizabeth Branwell, their aunt and Maria's sister.

The three remaining sisters and their brother Branwell were thereafter educated at home by their father and aunt Elizabeth Branwell. A shy girl, Emily was very close to her siblings and was known as a great animal lover, especially for befriending stray dogs she found wandering around the countryside.[9] Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had access to a wide range of published material; favourites included Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.[10]

Emily was the fifth of the six Brontë children. After the loss of her mother in 1821 and her two oldest sisters in 1825 she, Anne, Charlotte and Branwell, with only five years separating them, became a close and exclusive band. They neither went to school, nor made friends, in the village. Their playgrounds were the open moors at the back of the house, and their own imaginations.

Emily had less schooling than either of her sisters. She spent six months at the Clergy Daughters' School, Cowan Bridge, aged six ; three months at Roe Head School, Dewsbury, aged 17, and nine months at the Pensionnat Heger, Brussels, aged 24 to 25. The rest of her education was at home from Aunt Branwell and her sister Charlotte. Drawing and music masters visited the Parsonage (Emily was an accomplished pianist), and her broader education came from her father, who encouraged all his children to read widely, and talked to them as he would to adults, on matters as diverse as public policy and literary criticism.

Mr Brontë had intended his second daughter Elizabeth should be a housekeeper, and the other four governesses, but the only paid employment Emily ever undertook was teaching at Law Hill School near Halifax in 1838. She lasted only six months. Emily was only ever happy at home; she enjoyed housekeeping and the company of the family's elderly servant Tabitha Aykroyd.

Like her sisters and brother Branwell Emily was a writer from the time she could read. She collaborated with Anne in writing poetry and stories for their imaginary world of Gondal. Only a few poems from the Gondal sagas survive, but we know their collaboration continued until the early 1840s - it is possible Emily never abandoned her imaginary world. She was the least willing to agree to Charlotte's publication of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), and even after the publication of Wuthering Heights (1847), she declined to accompany her sisters to London and reveal the true identity behind her nom de plume Ellis Bell.

Alone among the Brontë children Emily was tall – about 5 foot 6 inches – and strong. She was an animated member of the family circle, but had no friends beyond that. None of her correspondence survives, and the little information we do have sometimes appears contradictory. We know she liked 'military good order' in her life, and also that she blended reality and fantasy in equal measure. She adored the family pets, yet had a violent temper, and disciplined them harshly. She avoided everyone outside the family, yet the characterisations in her novel are acutely observed. Her poetry is profoundly religious, yet she turned her back on religious institutions. For Emily religious fulfilment was to be found in the union of the individual spirit with the eternal spirits in nature; it was probably that conviction that informed her refusal of family help and medical assistance during her painful death from consumption.

She died on December 19, 1848, on the sofa in the dining-room, unable any longer to ascend the stairs to her bedroom.