Emily Bronte was born at Thornton, Yorkshire in 1818. Her mother died in 1821, and Emily, her four sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Anne, and her brother Branwell were left in the care of their aunt. In 1824 Emily went with her three elder sisters to a school for daughters of the clergy, but returned home to the village of Haworth with Charlotte after the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth. The remaining siblings formed their own closely integrated society, writing tales, fantasies, poems, journals and serial stories, and bringing out a monthly magazine. In 1842, Charlotte and Emily travelled to a boarding school in Brussels, where Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music, but they returned home following the death of their aunt. After Charlotte's discovery of her poetry notebooks, Emily reluctantly agreed to a joint publication with her sisters of Poems (attributed to Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, 1846). She is best remembered, however, for her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847; written under the pseudonym Ellis Bell). Published a year before her death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty, it is perhaps the most passionately original novel in the English language.
