Brontë, Emily (1818–1848)

English author. Name variations: (pseudonym) Ellis Bell. Born Emily Jane Brontë at Thornton, near Bradford, Yorkshire, July 30, 1818; died of consumption at Haworth, Dec 19, 1848; dau. of Maria Branwell Brontë and Reverend Patrick Brontë (Methodist cleric-author).

Victorian author of Wuthering Heights and middle sister to writers Charlotte and Anne Brontë, who withdrew into a private imaginative world; following death of mother, moved to Haworth (1821); was reared by an austere and intellectual cleric-father amid the bleak and secluded Yorkshire moors; with younger sister Anne, developed a rich imaginative world called Gondal, that formed the basis for early poems, which were discovered by elder sister Charlotte and published in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846); published Wuthering Heights (1847), which received strong, condemnatory reviews and sparked great controversy and speculation about author's identity, which she resolutely guarded until her death; contracted consumption (1848), one month after her brother Branwell died of the same disease and less than 6 months before Anne succumbed as well; holds a place of primacy in the annals of British literature.

See also Richard Benvenuto, Emily Brontë (Twayne, 1982); Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë (Blackwell, 1987); Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë (Oxford U. Press, 1971); Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford. Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (Coward-McCann, 1966); Ernest Dimnet, The Brontë Sisters (trans. by Louise Morgan Sill, Harcourt, 1928); Rebecca Fraser, The Brontës (Fawcett, 1988); Janet Barker, The Brontës (St. Martin, 1995); and Women in World History.