Biographie d'Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë (1818-48) was born at Thornton in York-shire. Two years later her father, Patrick Brontë, was appointed perpetual curate of Haworth, near Bradford. After the death of their mother in 1821 and of two elder sisters in 1825 the surviving Brontë children — Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell — were brought up in this somewhat bleak parsonage by their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. They formed their own closely integrated society and, in the Biographical Notice to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte explains the inducement to write : 'We were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life.
The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.' They wrote tales, fantasies, poems, journals and serial stories, and brought out a monthly magazine. Emily collaborated with Anne to write the Gondal cycle, which inspired some of her most passionate poems. After Charlotte's discovery of her poetry notebooks, Emily reluctantly agreed to a joint publication with her sisters of Poems (attributed to Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, 1846).
She is best remembered, however, for her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847 ; written under the pseudonym Ellis Bell). Published a year before her death from tuberculosis, it is perhaps the most passionately original novel in the English language. Pauline Nestor teaches English literature at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She read for a BA at the University of Melbourne and for an M.Phil and D.Phil at Oxford University.
She has written Female Friendships and Communities (1985), Charlotte Brontë (1987), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1992) and George Eliot (2002) and edited Villette New Casebook (1992). Lucasta Miller was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and is the author of The Brontë Myth (2001).
