Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte wrote one novel, refused to explain it, and died at thirty refusing a doctor until the last afternoon. She was the fifth Bronte child and the one who could least tolerate being away from Haworth - she lasted three months at Roe Head school and a few months teaching at Law Hill, and each time came home ill. With Anne she kept up the Gondal saga into adulthood, long after Charlotte and Branwell had abandoned their half of the childhood invention, and most of her poems belong to it. Charlotte found the poems by accident in 1845, read them without permission, and forced the sisters into print; the joint volume by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell sold two copies. Wuthering Heights came out in 1847 and was received as brutal and incomprehensible, which it partly is: a story told at two removes by unreliable narrators, with no moral centre and no character asking to be liked. Its reputation was made in the twentieth century. She caught cold at Branwell's funeral in September 1848 and was dead by December, having gone on doing the housework until the final day. The 1846 volume of poems by the three Bells cost the sisters about fifty pounds of their own money to publish. Wuthering Heights was issued in three volumes with Agnes Grey filling the third, by a publisher who had taken their money and did little to sell it. Charlotte edited the second edition after Emily s death, softening the dialect and adding a preface apologising for the book. Emily s handwriting was so small that the Gondal notebooks needed a magnifying glass. Her dog Keeper walked in her funeral procession.

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