Emily Bronte

Emily Jane Bronte (1818-48) only wrote Wuthering Heights and about a dozen poems, and yet is universally acknowledged to be one of the most gifted writers ever.
Her mother died when she was three. She lived with her four sisters and one brother in a bleak, isolated village in wild surroundings in Yorkshire. Her father, a gloomy curate, doted on his only son, Branwell, and expected little from his five daughters. But they would surprise him, while Branwell wasted his life and died an alcoholic and drug addict.
In 1824, he sent all five girls off to a cheap boarding school. Before long, the two oldest had died of malnutrition. Emily, Charlotte and Anne were quickly brought home, but only just in time and for ever after, Emily had an abiding fear of institutions and of feeling enclosed in any way. The girls became governesses, in order to support their brother Branwell, whom their father saw as a future great artist. But in 1845 Charlotte discovered some poems that Emily had written, and the following year Poems was published. Despite the commercial failure of this book, the three young women simultaneously began to write novels. In 1847, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights were all published. All three novels were and are highly acclaimed. But Emily’s story of Heathcliff and Cathy, and their consuming fatal passion, set against the bleak background of grey moors, never fails to astound and disturb the reader.

Emily, who never married and scarcely left her home village, had given birth to the most wonderful and terrible exposure of a person’s hidden, inner self that has ever been written. Afterwards it was as if she no longer needed to live. She caught cold at her brother’s funeral in October 1848; she refused all medication and continued to act as the house drudge, until in December she literally dropped dead of tuberculosis.
Wuthering Heights remains one of the most haunting and atmospheric love stories ever written.