Emily Brontë

Emily Jane Brontë was born on the thirtieth of July, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman, and Maria Branwell. When Emily was three, the family moved to Haworth, a bleak mill town on the edge of the West Yorkshire moors, and it was there that she would spend almost the entirety of her short life. The moors were not merely a backdrop to her existence; they were its essential condition. She walked them daily, in all weathers, and they entered her imagination so completely that Wuthering Heights is as much a portrait of a landscape as it is a novel about human beings.

The Brontë children — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne — created an extraordinarily rich imaginative world in childhood, writing tiny hand-sewn books about the fictional kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Emily’s Gondal poems, written throughout her life, form a substantial body of work that remained largely unpublished until after her death. They are among the most powerful lyric poems in the English language — fierce, metaphysical, and utterly unlike anything being written by her contemporaries.

In 1845, Charlotte discovered Emily’s poems and persuaded her sisters to publish a joint collection under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The volume sold two copies. The following year, all three sisters submitted novels. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was published first, to immediate acclaim. Emily’s Wuthering Heights appeared in December 1847, to bewilderment and hostility. Reviewers found it brutal, coarse, and morally incomprehensible. They could not place it within any existing literary tradition, because it did not belong to one.

Wuthering Heights is the story of Heathcliff, a foundling of unknown origin brought to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw, and his consuming, destructive love for Catherine Earnshaw. It is a novel about class, revenge, obsession, and the violence that lies beneath the surface of domestic life. It is also, more than almost any other novel in English, a book about the landscape — the moors as a force, as a moral condition, as the only place where the passions of its characters can find adequate expression.

Emily Brontë died on the nineteenth of December, 1848, of tuberculosis, aged thirty. She had refused medical treatment and continued to work until she could no longer stand. She died as she had lived — on her own terms, without concession. For the Cryptic Cult aesthetic — the conviction that wildness is a form of integrity, that passion and darkness are not opposites of beauty but its deepest expressions — Emily Brontë is not merely an author but a way of being in the world.