Emily Bronte: A Portrait

7 Pages 1790 Words

Emily Bronte was a very isolated person and few knew her personally. Clement Shorter goes as far a claiming that “she made no single friend other than her sister Ann (132).” Yet many other critics disagree claiming her to be close to her sister Charlotte as well as her brother, Branwell. There is no denying, however that she kept to herself. She, unfortunately left the world “without leaving behind her one single significant record which [is] any key to her character or her mode of thought save only the one famous novel, Wuthering Heights, and a few poems (Shorter 132).” According to Shorter, there are only two surviving letters written Emily Bronte to her sister Charlotte’s friend that can clue us into who Emily Bronte really was. This is why we must look to her work to gain a deeper insight of who Emily Bronte was. Through Emily Bronte’s works her readers can glimpse into her life to discover her dreams and beliefs.

Emily Jane Bronte “was born on 30 July 1818, but it was on the otherwise wholly unremarkable October afternoon in 1845 when her older sister Charlotte “accidentally lighted’ upon Emily’s poetry manuscript book that Emily was ineluctably destined to live for us. Every writer possesses this double sort of birth certificate… (Frank 9).” Emily spent most of her life isolated in her family’s Yorkshire manse. “Emily Bronte’s early years probably very much resemble those of her heroine, Cathy Earnshaw, in Wuthering Heights. Emily, like Cathy, was emotionally isolated and often alone on the moors, psychically alienated from her elders: Mr. Bronte and late Mrs. Bronte’s sister, Aunt Branwell… `Emily Bronte’s rural isolation (like Cathy Earnshaw’s in Wuthering Heights) was complete (Crandall 4-5).” “Emily, except for a few months of school at the age of six, did not again leave Haworth to attend boarding school until adolescence (Crandall 12).” Not only was Emily Bronte totally isola...