Dates of Birth/Death:1818-1848
Gender: Female
Literary Periods: Early Victorian, 1837-1860; Victorian Period, 1837-1901;
Nineteenth Century, 1800-1899
 
 

Biography

BRONTE, EMILY JANE (July 30, 1818-December 19, 1848), novelist and poet, was the middle in age of the three famous Bronte sisters, two years younger than Charlotte, a year and a half older than Anne. Like them, she was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, and moved in early childhood to Haworth, where she spent most of the remainder of her short life.
With Charlotte and her two oldest sisters, she was sent in 1824 to the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge which cost the lives of Maria and Elizabeth, and from which Emily and Charlotte were rescued just in time. A schoolmate remembered that Emily was the pet of the school, and she does not seem to have been any unhappier there than were the rest of them. She was only three at her mother's death, and Emily retained no memory of her. It must have been some time between 1825 and 1835 (whether occasioned by shock from being locked in the room where her mother died, or simply the result of the strange surroundings of all the Brontes in their childhood) that Emily developed that almost-mania against restraint, that agony under regimentation, which made schools and governess' positions alike, torture and imprisonment to her thereafter.

In any event, when Charlotte took Emily with her as a pupil to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head in 1835, three months of it almost finished her. She had to be brought back before she died of the experience. Again, in 1837, she acted as governess to a family in Halifax for six months, which was all that she could endure; the position besides was an onerous one, and she was supposed to be on constant duty for sixteen hours a day.

In 1842, when the three sisters planned to establish a private school of their own (strangely enough even Emily indulged in pleasant day dreams of that enterprise, which in actuality they would all have hated), she went with Charlotte to the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, and stayed for nine months. She was older now, and managed somehow to live through what must have been an unmitigated nightmare, but she made no friends. When Charlotte returned, after their aunt's death, to Brussels as an English teacher, Emily might have gone too, to teach piano, but she could not contemplate the ordeal. The rest of her life, except for a brief trip to York with Anne, was passed at Haworth. (There is a possibility that in 1838 Emily kept house for her brother Branwell in Bradford, but the evidence is only internal, from the dating of some of her poems.)

It was in 1845 that Charlotte discovered a manuscript volume of Emily's carefully guarded poems, and insisted on their publication with her own and Anne's verses. Some of these were "Gondal" poems, this being the imaginary saga which Emily and Anne conducted together, in the style of Branwell's and Charlotte's "Angria" cycle of ten years before. But some of them were the inmost expressions of Emily's hidden and secret self, and she never entirely forgave Charlotte for the outrage. She gave in, however, to Charlotte's persistency, and the Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were published in 1846.
During the months preceding and following, Emily produced her only prose work (for all her and Anne's Gondal stories were destroyed)--a blazing torch in the broad daylight of fiction, Wuthering Heights. It was published in the same volume as Anne's Agnes Grey in December 1847--just a year before Emily died.

Emily, too, had had her ambitions for fame, and she suffered under the neglect and misjudgment that greeted her violent creation. Perhaps she suffered, secretly, the more when Charlotte's Jane Eyre became so instant a success that the novels by the other sisters were ascribed to "Currer Bell." But far beyond this was Emily's terror at the thought that anyone--even her father--should know her as the author of Wuthering Heights, or exploited in any fashion.
Branwell Bronte was by this time undergoing the last dreadful phase of his wasted life--a drunkard and drug addict, almost an outcast from the family with whom he was still forced to live, and on or over the verge of madness. The rash critics who have guessed that he had any hand at all in Wuthering Heights have read very little of either his or Emily's other work. Branwell was a hollow shell as a writer as well as in his painting; he was incapable of writing a page of his sister's book. If he hinted that the book was his, that is no more remarkable than his obsession that his former employer was madly in love with him and would have married him after her husband's death except for a (purely imaginary) stipulation in the husband's will. As a matter of fact, Charlotte
states explicitly that he never even knew of the publication of the novels of any of his sisters; and though Charlotte is sometimes inaccurate, this time there is supporting evidence that she was right. Branwell died in September 1848 and Emily was to follow him in less than three months.
Emily probably caught cold at Branwell's funeral, and her cold turned into inflammation of the lungs. It is doubtful if she wanted very much to live. Her pride and obstinacy kept her from yielding to any pain--the same pride and obstinacy that had made her, the wild genius, take upon herself most of the worst drudgery of the household for many years. She would not go to bed, she would not have a doctor, she would not even take any home remedies; she simply ignored the dereliction of her dying body, until at last she fell dead before her sisters, in the very act of
trying to stand erect.
Emily Bronte is an almost indescribable person. No labels fit her. One may say that she was fiercely reserved and taciturn, wholly introverted, suffering damnably all her life long for the love she could not give or attract, diabolically proud, the grimmest of stoics--and all these things are true, yet they do not make up the sum of Emily. As a person, in one sense, she hardly exists--we hear that she had beautiful, liquid, grey-blue eyes; we know she was a fine musician; we feel the strong masculine strain in her, the affinity with the desolate moor country and its wasting winds; but still, as in life she eluded those who sought to pin her down or hold her, she eludes our curious scrutiny now.
She is, as Rebecca West has said, an artist who transcends the limitations of her medium. Her poems are "on the edge of greatness," and sometimes they overstep the edge. She carries expression beyond the limits of expressibility, and we have always an uneasy feeling that one moment more, and we shall see before us divinity or madness.

And Wuthering Heights is almost as indescribable as is its author. On the framework of a melodramatic story (in part a reminiscence of a tale by the German romanticist Hoffman), Emily Bronte has built up a living thing. She has told the story twice, in one novel--first as it was in the depths of her soul (for "Romer Wilson" has shown plainly enough that Heathcliff, the terrible hero of the book, is in essence the hidden Emily herself), then as it might have been, relieved of the dreadful shadow of Heathcliff. It is a tale of usurpation, revenge, and a devilish, preternatural passion that tamer beings can scarcely recognize as love. It has all the deficiencies of a book written by a woman living in isolation, half educated, inexperienced in any world except the world of imagination. It is a wild prose commentary on the more direct (and therefore more jealously secreted) revelations of Emily's personal poems. As Professor A. A. Jacks has remarked, "Wutheiring Heights bears the same relation to Jane Eyre that Webster bears to Shakespeare, if one could imagine Webster greater than Shakespeare." Charlotte was an immensely talented person; Emily is pure genius. There is perhaps no other author in English literature who has produced so little and yet has so high a rank.

Emily Bronte is no minor author of a dozen great poems and one unique novel; she is a major figure who poured all of herself into a narrow mould. One cannot even say that she died too soon to complete her work; her work was already completed, and she died of its completion. Her death is next door to suicide. She had given birth to the most awful exposition of a hidden self that ever found its way into words, and life after that profound shattering of a terrible lifelong secrecy was no longer possible. From her childhood Emily never spoke her secret thoughts. When the iron repression broke and she spoke them at last, she died of the cataclysmic shattering.

(M. A. deF.)

              Adapted from data developed by the H.W. Wilson Company, Inc.
 

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