Emily Brontë: The Enigma Who Wrote Wuthering Heights

Of the three Brontë sisters, Emily is the one who escapes. Charlotte left thousands of letters; Anne left candid prefaces and a deathbed of documented courage; Emily left one novel, fewer than two hundred poems, a handful of scraps – and a silence so complete that biographers have been arguing over her for 175 years. She published one book, Wuthering Heights, watched it bewilder the critics, and died at 30 without ever knowing she had written one of the enduring masterpieces of world literature. For visitors to Brontë Country she is the presiding spirit: the sister of the moors. Here is what we actually know about the most mysterious major writer in English – and where you can come closest to her.

The facts, such as they are

Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, near Bradford, the fifth of the six children, and moved to Haworth Parsonage as a toddler in 1820. Her mother died the following year; her two eldest sisters died in 1825 after the Cowan Bridge school disaster – six-year-old Emily had briefly been the school's youngest pupil, remembered by staff as a pet, and was withdrawn in time. Thereafter she was educated almost entirely at home, and home schooled her in the two subjects that mattered: books and the moor.

Every attempt to launch Emily into the world failed on the same rock – separation from Haworth made her physically ill. Three months at Roe Head school as a teenager broke her health until Charlotte engineered her return; a teaching post at Law Hill near Halifax in 1838–39 lasted around six months; even the great Brussels adventure of 1842, studying French with Charlotte at the Pensionnat Heger – where the formidable Monsieur Heger judged her the more remarkable intellect of the two, a logician who "should have been a man" – ended when their aunt's death called them home, and Emily simply never left Yorkshire again. She was not, those who knew her insist, sour or misanthropic: she was self-sufficient to a degree the world found unreadable. She baked the household bread with a German grammar propped before her, walked the moors in all weathers with her enormous dog Keeper – a mastiff-cross as formidable as his mistress – whistled to the moorland birds, and reserved her tenderness for animals and her family. "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child," Charlotte wrote after her death.

Gondal: the secret engine

The key to Emily is a country that never existed. When the four children divided their imaginary empires, Emily and Anne created Gondal – a storm-swept island kingdom of doomed queens, treason and passion – and while the others outgrew their worlds, Emily never abandoned hers: she and Anne were still writing Gondal sagas in their twenties, and many of Emily's greatest poems began as speeches by Gondal characters. This matters enormously for understanding Wuthering Heights, because Emily had been rehearsing its material – obsessive love beyond death, revenge across generations, wild landscape as destiny – for two decades in private before the world saw a page. The novel that critics found inexplicable from a parson's daughter was, in truth, the visible tip of a lifelong submerged practice.

1845–1848: the notebook, the poems, the novel

The chain of events that gave us Wuthering Heights began with a trespass. In autumn 1845 Charlotte opened one of Emily's private notebooks and read her poems – and recognised, as she later wrote, something quite different from the usual verse women wrote: condensed, vigorous and genuine. Emily's fury at the violation took days to subside; the compromise was the joint pseudonymous collection Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), Emily hiding behind "Ellis". Modern criticism ranks her poems – "No coward soul is mine" above all – among the finest of the century. Then came the novel: Wuthering Heights, written at the parsonage dining table in the nightly workshop with her sisters, and published in December 1847. Reviewers were shocked and baffled – powerful, they conceded, but coarse, savage, surely the work of a rough-mannered man. Emily kept the worst reviews in her writing desk, where Charlotte found them after her death.

December 1848: the hardest death in literary biography

Branwell died in September 1848; at his funeral Emily caught cold, and tuberculosis – the family destroyer – took hold with terrifying speed. What followed has haunted readers ever since: Emily refused all medical help, all remedies, all concession. She rose every morning, dressed, fed the dogs, did her tasks, declining to acknowledge the illness while it visibly consumed her – Charlotte's letters through that autumn are a study in helpless anguish. Only at midday on 19 December 1848 did she finally whisper that a doctor might be sent for; she died on the parsonage sofa around two o'clock, aged 30, less than three months after her brother. Keeper the mastiff walked in the funeral procession to the church next door and, the family recorded, howled outside her bedroom door for nights afterwards. She is buried in the family vault inside Haworth church; the sofa, and her possessions, remain in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and her manuscript poems are treasured in collections including the British Library, explorable at bl.uk.

Meeting Emily: go to the moor

You cannot really meet Emily indoors – even the parsonage holds her lightly. She survives in landscape: the heather sweeps behind Haworth, the becks and crags of the Brontë Waterfall, the wind-hammered ruin of Top Withens, the purple blaze of late-summer moorland. Walk out from the parsonage's back lane with weather coming in, and the authoress of Wuthering Heights stops being a mystery and becomes simply legible: this, all of this, was what she refused to leave. Our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside – a maximum of six guests – are built to deliver precisely that encounter, pairing the family's story with the living moorland that made her. Of all literary pilgrimages, Emily's asks the least imagination: her world is still there, still wuthering. Go and stand in it.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.