The Enigmatic Emily

How much do we really know about "the weirdest of three weird sisters?"

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*Just a quick head’s up: the following essay contains brief references to disordered eating and neurodivergent stereotypes.

Emily Brontë painted by Patrick Branwell Brontë, National Portrait Gallery, London

“An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world.”  

Emily Brontë is best known as the author of the wild and blistering novel Wuthering Heights, as well as a smattering of poetry written in her youth under the pen-name Ellis Bell.

But having attempted to research her in the past, it has become clear that very little is actually known about the enigmatic sister who was a member of arguably the most famous literary family in the world.

What is known is mostly down to reports from others, primarily her older sister Charlotte, who outlived all her siblings and who ensured Emily and Anne’s literary significance by putting their work out into the world.  But as the opening quote to this essay suggests, even being such a close sibling didn’t guarantee an understanding of this complex young woman, who was reported to prefer the company of animals and tramping across the wild moorland around the family’s Yorkshire parsonage. 

Top Withens, Yorkshire Moors, supposed setting for Wuthering Heights

As Katherine Frank points out in her 1990 biography: “we perceive Emily Brontë nearly always at second hand in Charlotte Brontë’s letters, in the reminiscences of family and friends, acquaintances and servants, and in Elizabeth Gaskilll’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë.”¹

Gaskill’s book is often referenced as the utmost word on the life of the Brontë’s, being written at the behest of Charlotte’s father, Patrick, following his daughter’s death in 1855.  However, Gaskill reportedly never even met Emily, befriending her sister Charlotte in the years following Emily’s death.

Emily was thirty years old at the time of her death from tuberculosis in 1848.  She had succumbed to the same fate as her siblings.  Her only remaining sister, Charlotte, according to Frank’s biography, was grief stricken at the loss of her remaining sibling, and the following years were long and lonely at the draughty parsonage where she resided with her self-contained father.  

Emily had written many letters to Charlotte whilst the latter was working as a governess as well as studying alone in Brussels.  However, none of these letters have survived, and only a handful of letters Emily wrote to acquaintances outside her family circle, such as to Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey, remain.  

“Much of what we know of Emily Brontë is perceived through the refracting and sometimes distorting lens of Charlotte Brontë’s vision.”  Katherine Frank in A Chainless Soul

Several biographers have attempted to pin down the life of Emily Brontë. 

Interestingly, in Frank’s book, she suggests that, if she were alive today, Emily would likely be diagnosed with an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa.  She assumes this from Emily’s refusal to eat and her extreme slenderness; her preoccupation with food and cooking; and her obsessive need for control, giving examples such as the hunger strike she and sister Anne undertook in order to persuade their father of their wishes.  She also references Emily’s retreat into her ongoing interior fantasy world and her social isolation.  

Frank’s insistence is that the limited information we hold on Emily shows a young woman who was overwhelmingly hungry, obsessed with power and control and terrified of disorder, claiming that she responded to the helplessness of her life through her disordered eating and writing, choosing to seize control of the only thing that was malleable to her: her own body.  In her creative world, Frank insists, she utilised her writing to reorder and rewrite the world in which she felt herself entrapped.

In these findings, Frank admits that she departs most radically from previous studies of Emily Brontë’s life.

I found Frank’s arguments not totally convincing, and as I turned to other sources of research, I found attempts to explain Emily’s personality (which I often suspected indicated her rebellious persuasion) to suggest that Emily exhibited what we may now reference as neurodivergent traits. 

This has been discussed by, amongst others, biographer Claire Harman, who suggested in a 2016 biography on sister Charlotte, Charlotte Brontë: A Life, that Emily’s traits such as a dislike of leaving home and bursts of frustration may have been down to a diagnosis of Autism.  At an event at the Edinburgh international book festival, Harman also listed other traits of Emily’s, including her genius and her discomfort in social situations as being symptoms of Asperger’s.²

She references a famous case from Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte where it was claimed that Emily had punched the family dog, after it dirtied the laundry, leaving it “half blind and stupefied,” recalling that this was “just a sign of Emily’s strength of character”.  But as we have already discovered, Gaskell never actually met Emily, nor was present at any such incident, plus the fact that Emily is reported elsewhere as loving the company of her pets and regularly walking the moors with only her beloved mastiff, Keeper, for company. 

Harman’s ideas caused some controversy and backlash online by her comments that:

“It is actually very disturbing. I think Charlotte and everybody was quite frightened of Emily. I think she was an Asperger’s-ey person…She was such a genius and had total imaginative freedom...Containing Emily, protecting Emily, not being alarmed by Emily, was a big project for the whole household. She’s an absolutely fascinating person – a very troubling presence, though.”

Understandably, readers of Harman took offence at her choice of phrasing, as well as her assumptions that a young woman preferring the company of animals, alone time, and escaping into her writing, as well as that she may have been considered ‘a genius’, required labelling. 

I would imagine that anyone who loves to read, write, walk alone to gather their thoughts, feels more comfortable at home and enjoys the company of animals, will recognise themselves in many of Emily’s traits.  Simply putting a modern label on a creative genius feels somewhat reductive.  Despite this, she does appear (again, from the stories of others) as an abrupt and difficult to assimilate young woman, whom the household nevertheless held in great affection and esteem.

The Brontë Parsonage, Howarth

Something I do tend to agree on wholeheartedly with Harman is her assertion that many readers have sentimentalised Emily’s single novel Wuthering Heights as a romance.  As she points out:

“...it is so full of violence, so full of things I would not classify as romantic at all.”

Harman’s biography goes on to suggest that Emily shared many behavioural qualities with her father Patrick. 

“He gave them an immense latitude in terms of his interest in issues of the day that transferred very readily. The children liked nothing more than to read a parliamentary report around the fireside. They were a very unusual family in that respect, and he did not restrain them intellectually. But he was a very chilly man, very emotionally strange.”

In her biography of Emily published in 2018, however, author and academic Claire O’Callaghan argues that although Emily was a shy and reserved young woman, she should be admired as a woman ahead of her time.³

Stating as I have previously noted that Emily’s reputation was entirely brought forth by others, she claims this was mainly due to sister Charlotte’s responses to the criticism of Emily and Anne’s writing after their deaths.  Whether attempting to clear her sisters’ names, or in an effort to preserve the image of the family, O’Callaghan states that Charlotte:

“...adopted the strategy of appealing for pity by presenting her sisters as a bit weird and a bit strange, people who did not really know what they were doing.” 

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte further added to this embellishment of Emily’s character assassination, resulting in a mythic presentation of the writer.  

O’Callaghan’s concerns mainly circulate around the mostly negative ways in which Emily has been portrayed, whether as a people-hating spinster roaming the moors along with her dog, or as a painfully shy and socially awkward girl who became sick whenever she left home.

Conversely, she is also often referenced as being stubborn and defiant, willingly withholding her own physical or mental ailments; or as too fragile to endure the real world.  

O’Callaghan’s concerns are that the myths into Emily’s personality are damaging: 

“They perpetuate this idea that she was weird and different and strange and other in a way that is quite hostile.”

Whilst she admits that it appears that Emily was a shy, reserved woman who craved solitude and loved to get outside and walk on the moors with her dog, O’Callaghan argues that this did not make her odd.  

“Today when we think about character traits and personality traits we take a different approach to things, we try to accommodate and understand differences or social awkwardness or anxieties or just different ways of being. We try not to stigmatise people.”

O’Callaghan interestingly goes on to explore how Emily would assimilate into today’s society, fascinatingly (to someone who studies women’s writing and feminism) arguing that she would be more at home in a more accepting, tolerant, feminist society.

As has always been my own summing up of Emily’s only published novel, O’Callaghan states the story of Cathy and Heathcliff being seen as a romance novel needs a re-examination: 

“I think it is about a lot more and I think that love story is quite a damaging one…I think it can be read as a cautionary tale against damaging romance and violent romance…Heathcliff is clearly a horrible man, yet he is often read as the archetypal anti-hero. I really question that word hero. He is just vile from the outset.”

Another ‘theory’ that has proliferated discourse on Emily is her sexuality.  Often viewed as the more masculine of the sisters, both paintings and descriptions of her personality have driven biographers to conclude that Emily identified as a lesbian.  This was an idea explored by academic Camille Paglia and Brontë biographer Stevie Davies.  Some academics have drawn attention to the character of Heathcliff in Emily’s novel, claiming that the novel is a lesbian text, with Heathcliff embodying Emily’s sexual identity.  

Again, however, there has been no evidence to support any firm conclusion on the matter of Emily’s sexual orientation, despite some speculation on whether Emily knew and engaged in a relationship with the diarist Anne Lister between 1838-1839.  Other ‘theories’ have arisen over the years, including Emily’s close relationship with brother Bramwell indicating a possible incestuous relationship, and a 1946 film Devotion suggesting that Charlotte’s future husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls, was in fact Emily’s lover previously.

Many of these theories appear to be based on assumptions about both the personality, presentation, and isolation of the writer who has often been described as “the weirdest of the three weird sisters.”  

Other assumptions, however, have been based on the violence and toxic, disturbing nature of her novel.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily presents events which have already occurred, relayed by servant Nelly Dean to newcomer Mr Lockwood when he pays a visit to the strange house belonging to Heathcliff, of whom Lockwood is a tenant.  He spends a harrowing stay, listening to what is presumed to be the ghost of the late Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw, calling to the object of her affection, Heathcliff.

Wuthering Heights has captivated readers and academics for many years.  It tends to hold a strange, mythical power over the reader, perhaps echoing that of its enigmatic author.  Portraying the most toxic of “love stories”, it hurtles through the violent and turbulent recent past of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and the orphaned boy who is brought to the     home of the book’s title to live with the Earnshaw children.  Brontë’s supporters have drawn attention to her ability to show the uncomfortable truths of humanity, striking a chord with ongoing generations of readers. 

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

On first publication in 1847, the novel unsettled and outraged critics, with complaints that its  characters were “demons in human form,” with some calling for the book to be discarded or burned.  Like all attempted suppression of literary texts however, the book continued to sell.

After Emily’s death a year following publication, her novel continued to disturb readers, who talked of its violent, graphic content.  Her sister Charlotte, meanwhile, leapt to her sister’s defence, writing an introduction to the book and referencing Emily as an innocent, primal child of the moors.  Academics and critics have suggested that this was an easier way for Charlotte to deal with both her sister’s writing and the grief over her death: better to forge a myth than admit that a perfectly sane and rational woman such as her sister could write such things.

However, there is evidence that Emily had been imagining and writing the kinds of things which made it into Wuthering Heights since she was a child.  

At the age of 11, she had bold visions about what would eventually reveal itself as key plot details of the book.  These are now housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which is well worth a visit if you are in the vicinity.  

A small hand drawn picture completed by Emily and dated 1829 shows a smashed mullioned window, with a hand reaching through.  It is said to be the earliest documented reference to Cathy’s famous appearance at Lockwood’s bedroom window, influencing the British singer-songwriter Kate Bush in her immortal tribute to the writer.  

Other evidence also shows that the origins of the book may lie in a collaboration between Emily and sister Anne, when, as teens, they created a make-believe kingdom named Gondal, set in a similar Yorkshire landscape to their own.  

The two sisters’ would escape into their fantasy world of castles, mountaintops, and howling winds between 1832 until their untimely deaths in the late 1840s.  The pair would plot out their stories in Gondal by the fireside at home in the Parsonage and whilst travelling by train.  

This exercise in fantasy allowed Emily an escape hatch: her poetry is often fraught with the love affairs of rulers, exile, death and dungeons.  It is littered with sensational content and shows the heart of a revolutionary writer of her era, leading, as did her novel, to claims that Emily was a protofeminist writer.  Gondal itself is ruled over by a warrior queen, Augusta, described as a strong-minded, ruthless, Amazonian beauty.  Subversively for the era, she takes lovers, driving them to exile or imprisonment, or to die of broken hearts or suicide.  

Strong I stand though I have borne
Anger hate and bitter scorn
Strong I stand and laugh to see
How mankind have fought with me

Shade of mast’ry I contemn
All the puny ways of men

Emily Brontë, speaking as Augusta

Emily’s created heroine named Augusta, ruler of Gondal, like Emily herself, was a woman who loved the wild and rugged terrain of her surroundings, leading critics and academics to suggest that Augusta seamlessly morphed into Wuthering Heights’ wilful and wild Cathy.

Both Cathy and Augusta are shown to run wild in their Yorkshire/Gondal landscape, at one with the heather-clad moors, both breaking the hearts of the men who love them.  Cathy, love her or loathe her (I teeter between the two) embodies the same spirit as the ruler Augusta, both of whom are fighting for survival in a patriarchal society.

As Emily initially published her novel under the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell (as a whole, the sisters’ published their first edition of collected poems under the name Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell), Emily likely attempted to escape the prejudice of the male critics who would eventually criticise her dark and violent tale of love, revenge, and despair amongst the wilds of the Yorkshire moors.  

Perhaps this is why, for many young female readers who come to Wuthering Heights, Emily is still recognised as the real female warrior, wielding her pen as her weapon in order to show us the ways in which women can fight, love, create, and ultimately, remain enigmatic beyond the grave. 

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1. Katherine Frank, Emily Brontë, A Chainless Soul, (1990), Penguin:London.

2. Claire Harman, Charlotte Brontë: A Life, (2016), Penguin:London. 

3. Claire O’Callaghan, Emily Bronte Reappraised: A View from the twenty-first century, (2018), Saraband:UK.