The book that was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell: Wuthering Heights, tells the story of Heathcliff and his harmful and unfulfilled love for Catherine Earnshaw.
Wuthering Heights immortalized the melancholy moors of Yorkshire, so loved by Emily. The narration and the emotions experienced testify both to the imagination and to the observation of a daughter of an English priest.
«It is as if Emily Brontë could erase everything that is believed to refer to human beings and fill in these “unrecognizable transparency"with such a passion for life that it transcends reality," wrote author Virginia Woolf
The most unknown of the Brontë literary family, Emily was also the most mystical of the bunch. She was three years old when her mother died, after which her older sisters were sent to school and Emily was later reunited with them. Harsh conditions and an epidemic of typhoid weakened the health of all the girls at the school, and in 1825 the two Brontë sisters, the eldest ones, Mary and Elizabeth, died within six weeks of each other.
And so it was that Brontë's four remaining children – Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, spent their childhood in the parish house at Haworth with their widowed father and an aunt. Fantasy reigned in their house; to inspire the guovani Brontë and to create the imaginary world of Watermelon. While Emily and Anne with equal imagination, created their kingdom gondal.
At the age of twenty Emily left home to teach but this experience lasted only six months. She alone when she returned to Haworth Parsonage and she devoted herself entirely to writing. Apparently shy with strangers, in the family she proved to be full of spirit and love, both towards the people around her and towards the animals or the moors of the Yorkshire.
He published a volume of poems with his sisters, Charlotte and Anne under the title Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Emily was thirty when she fell ill with tuberculosis, while her brother Branwell had already died three months before her.
Emily never came recognized in her lifetime as the author of Wuthering Heights, nor would he ever learn of the book's critical acclaim.
Charlotte praised her sisters Emily and Anne: “to strangers they were nothing; but to those who have known them all their lives in the intimacy of a close relationship, they have been truly good and great.'
Publisher Penguin Random House estimates that an average reader, reading at a speed of 300 words per minute, would take approximately 5 hours and 53 minutes to complete Wuthering Heights. For those not inclined to spend their summer time on the Yorkshire moors with Cathy and Heathcliff, the following words from Charlotte Brontë will be the best testimony to Emily's character and her importance to her:
Left without all of her five siblings (the last three missing in an eight-month period), Charlotte wrote of Emily's death in the Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell in 1850: "Never in all her life had she lingered on any task that was in front of her, and she didn't linger now… day by day, when I saw with what strength she met suffering, I looked at her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, in reality, I have never seen anyone so capable.'
At the National Portrait Gallery in London, among the portraits of the most celebrated citizens of Great Britain, can be found The Bronte Sisters (1834), a painting of Anne, Emily and Charlotte by his brother Branwell, where Emily appears as the central character, while Branwell is seen almost blurred, so as to emphasize his sister as the most compelling figure in the portrait (image in cover).
Translation from the original version to the English page of our Magazine
https://www.firstonline.info/en/1818-2018-emily-bronte-biography/
