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Emily Bronte

© Megan Drummond

Emily Bronte was born on July 30, 1818, the fifth of six children in the family.

Emily Bronte lived her life much the same way her older sister, Charlotte, did. She was six years old at the time of her mother’s death. Along with Charlotte, young Emily was sent away to Cowan Bridge to attend the school for daughters of clergymen. Illness soon struck the two eldest Bronte sisters, who were already attending the school. The illnesses took the lives of Emily’s sisters within a month of each other and Emily was sent home due to the grim conditions of the school and her own fragile health.

The creativity of the Bronte children was sparked when their father brought home a set of 12 carved wooden soldiers. The siblings soon began work on a series of stories about imaginary kingdoms. The kingdom of Angria in the Glass Town saga belonged to Charlotte and their brother Branwell. Emily and Anne created two imaginary islands, Gondal and Gaaldine, in the north and south Pacific. Although more than a hundred tiny hand-written volumes of Angria survive today, no prose narratives of Emily’s islands remain. Scholars can be certain that the chronicles of Gondal and Gaaldine did exist because several of Emily’s poems refer to places and characters of the Glass Town saga.

Emily joined Charlotte, a teacher at the time, upon her return to Roe Head in 1835. She remained there as a pupil for three months. She was sent home after alarming Charlotte with the rapid decline of her physical health. Emily again followed her older sister to Brussels in 1842, with the intention of improving their French and opening their own school. The death of their aunt, the family housekeeper, compelled Emily’s return to Hawthorn to assume the household duties for her father.

With her brother and younger sister working in York and her older sister in Brussels, Emily was alone in the house with her father. During this time of great freedom and creativity, Emily began dividing her poetry into separate categories: Gondalan and non-Gondalan. During this time, Emily also began work on her first and only novel.

Shortly after the family was reunited in 1845, Charlotte discovered some of Emily’s poems. The discovery of the poems led the sisters to self-publish a book of verse. In May of 1846, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published. The volume sold only two copies.

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