The Greats Abridged: Wuthering Heights

About Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte (1818-1848) was born at Thornton, Bradford, Yorkshire, and just after the birth of her sister Anne, she moved with her family to Haworth, where she spent most of her life. Emily attended Cowan Bridge School, a Church of England clergymen's daughters' boarding school, but only for six months. Between 1830 and 1835, Emily taught at Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head, where her sister Charlotte also taught.

After serving as a governess in Halifax, Yorkshire, Emily accompanied her sisters Anne and Charlotte to Brussels, where they attended the Pensionnat Heger with the goal of improving their proficiency in French in order to start their own school. Their plans for their own school, however, foundered, and the sisters were reunited at Haworth in August 1845. When in the autumn of 1845 Charlotte accidentally discovered the manuscript of Emily's Gondal verses, she initiated the publication of a volume of poems by all three sisters, who as a clergyman's daughters thought it advisable to adopt the noms des plumes Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell.

A year after the publication by Thomas Cautley Newby, London, of Wuthering Heights, the eighteenth-century romance for which she is best known, Emily died of tuberculosis. She was just thirty years old but had already produced a romantic tragedy in novel form, written over the course of 1845-46, yet to be surpassed in the English language.