Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet, born on 30 July 1818 and dead by 19 December 1848, at the age of thirty. She grew up with her sisters Charlotte and Anne and her brother Branwell in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, where her father served as a clergyman. The children made up stories and poems together from an early age, and the wild landscape around their home shaped much of her imagination. As an adult she lived quietly and was known as intensely private. In 1846 she published poems alongside her sisters under the male-sounding pen name Ellis Bell. Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, appeared the following year. It puzzled and shocked some early readers but is now seen as one of the most original works in English fiction. Her poems, often about nature, freedom and the soul, are also highly admired. She died young, leaving a small but powerful body of work.