Emily Brontë
1818–1848 · English novelist and poet, author of Wuthering Heights.
Emily Brontë was born in 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth child of the clergyman Patrick Brontë, and grew up at the parsonage in Haworth, on the edge of the moors. After her mother and two elder sisters died, she was raised with her sisters Charlotte and Anne and her brother Branwell, and she and Anne invented an imaginary world called Gondal, about which they wrote poems and stories. Emily was shy and spent nearly all her life at Haworth, where she loved walking on the moors with her dog, Keeper. She briefly attended school, taught for a few months, and in 1842 studied with Charlotte in Brussels. In 1846 the sisters published a book of poems as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, Emily being Ellis; her poems are now especially admired. Her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and their families across two generations on the Yorkshire moors. Emily caught a cold at Branwell's funeral, developed tuberculosis and died at Haworth in December 1848, aged 30.
Emily Brontë is also an author in the library: author page and works.
Faith: One of the children of Patrick Brontë, a clergyman; her personal beliefs are not well documented. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) (via Wikisource)
Key dates
- 1818 Born in Thornton, Yorkshire
- 1842 Studies in Brussels
- 1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
- 1847 Wuthering Heights published
- 1848 Dies at Haworth
See where they lived
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Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë grew up and wrote in the parsonage at Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. The Brontë Parsonage Museum still stands there and welcomes learning visits for schools and families.
Fun facts
- She painted a watercolour of her dog, Keeper; it is one of 29 of her drawings and paintings that survive. (Source: Emily Brontë (Wikipedia))
- When her father bought a piano, she became a skilled player. (Source: Emily Brontë (Wikipedia))
Record-breaker
Firsts and records, worded as the sources give them ("first known", "at the time").
- At six she was the youngest pupil at her school, where the superintendent called her 'quite the pet nursling of the school'. (Source: Emily Brontë (Wikipedia))
Read about them
Grades 9–12
- Wuthering Heights · In the library
More lives
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