Emily Brontë

Born on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire, Emily Brontë grew up in the Brontë family parsonage at Haworth, where she and her siblings created rich imaginary worlds and wrote stories and poems from an early age. She was the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë, and she remained closely tied to the Yorkshire landscape that would later shape her writing.

In 1846, Emily published poems with her sisters Charlotte and Anne under the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The following year, her only novel, Wuthering Heights, appeared under the name Ellis Bell. Its fierce emotions, harsh beauty, and moorland setting puzzled some early readers, but the book later came to be seen as one of the great novels in English.

Emily Brontë died in Haworth on 19 December 1848, at just 30 years old. Although little personal record survives, her reputation has continued to grow, not only because of Wuthering Heights but also because of her poems, which reveal the same strength, independence, and haunting imagination.