Victorian
Emily Brontë
1818 – 1848
English novelist and poet (1818–1848)
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- British
- Gothic
- Romanticism
About
Emily Jane Brontë was an English writer best known for her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. She also co-authored a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Portrait by Branwell Brontë (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.
Life on the Timeline
Major Works
Exam Dossier
Most-asked topics
- Wuthering Heights (1847) — narrative structure and framing devices
- Nelly Dean and Lockwood as unreliable narrators
- Gothic elements in Wuthering Heights
- The theme of nature vs. culture (Wuthering Heights vs. Thrushcross Grange)
- Heathcliff as Byronic hero
- Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) and the Bell pseudonyms
- Emily Brontë's poetry (Gondal poems, lyric verse)
- Brontë family and the Haworth/Yorkshire moors setting
Previous-year themes
- Double narrative frame (Lockwood-Nelly Dean) in Wuthering Heights
- Gothic and Romantic elements in Wuthering Heights
- Heathcliff as Byronic/Gothic hero
- Use of pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis, Acton Bell) and Victorian women's authorship
- Nature imagery and the moors as symbolic landscape
- Two-generation structure of Wuthering Heights (Catherine/Heathcliff and Cathy/Hareton)
- Emily Brontë's place among the Brontë sisters and Victorian fiction
Common confusions
- Confusing Emily Brontë's pseudonym Ellis Bell with Charlotte's Currer Bell or Anne's Acton Bell.
- Confusing Wuthering Heights' setting/houses with Jane Eyre's Thornfield Hall (a Charlotte Brontë work).
- Assuming Emily Brontë wrote more than one novel; Wuthering Heights was her only novel.
- Mixing up the two generations of characters in Wuthering Heights (Catherine/Heathcliff vs. the younger Cathy/Hareton/Linton).
- Confusing the narrator Nelly Dean's perspective with an objective, fully reliable authorial voice.
- Dating Wuthering Heights to 1848 (Emily's death year) instead of its actual publication year, 1847.
Memory tricks
'E' for Emily, 'E' for Ellis Bell, and 'E' for Earnshaw (her novel's family).
Sisters in birth order match their pen-name order: Charlotte-Emily-Anne born in that order, and Currer-Ellis-Acton is the order they used on the title page.
'1846 Poems, 1847 Prose' — poetry collection came a year before the novel.
Wuthering Heights = wild/windy Heights (Earnshaws) vs. calm Grange (Lintons) — Heights sounds harsh, Grange sounds gentle.
Emily died in 1848 — just one year after her single great novel appeared in 1847.
