Emily Bronte

Emily Jane Brontë (Thornton, July 30, 1818 – Haworth, December 19, 1848) was a British writer. His most important work is the novel Wuthering Heights (1847), considered a classic of English literature, which was published under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell in order to overcome the difficulties which women of the 19th century had in the recognition of their literary work. The novel, initially considered wild and coarse by critics, was recognized in time as the most genuine, profound and restrained expression of the English romantic soul and one of the most important works of the Victorian era.

Biography

She was the fifth of six siblings. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth, where her father was appointed Anglican parson.

Their mother died on 22 September 1821, and in August 1824 Charlotte and Emily were sent with their older sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to Clergy Daughters College, Cowan Bridge, Lancashire, where they fell ill with tuberculosis.. This school inspired Charlotte Brontë to describe the sinister Lowood School that appears in her novel Jane Eyre. Maria and Elizabeth returned to Haworth ill and died of tuberculosis in 1825. For this reason, and the poor conditions of the school, the family removed Charlotte and Emily from the boarding school.

During their childhood and after the death of their mother, the three Brontë sisters, and Emily, together with their brother Branwell, invented a fictional world consisting of three imaginary countries - Angria, Gondal and Glass Town - and used to play games make up stories set in it.

To amuse themselves in that isolated village, they transformed wooden soldiers in their imaginations into characters in a series of stories they wrote about the imaginary kingdom of Anglia, owned by Charlotte and her brother Branwell (1817-1848), and Gondal's, which was Emily and Anne's. About a hundred handwritten notebooks, begun in 1829, of the Anglian chronicles survive, but none of the Gondal saga, begun in 1834, except for a few poems by Emily.

In 1838, Emily began working as a governess on Law Hill, near Halifax. Later, together with her sister Charlotte, she was a student at a private school in Brussels, until the death of her aunt made her return to England. Emily stayed on as manager of the family home thereafter.

The great preoccupation of his last years was the care of Branwell, a man unsuccessful in painting, who had been dismissed from the modest job he had obtained in the railway offices and expelled from the clerk's office of a Mr. Robinson for courting to your wife. The addiction to the drink was extreme in the last years to which he added the indiscriminate consumption of opium. Emily, considered a severe person, with an intransigent temperament and little effusive, attended him until the end of his days. She stayed awake until Branwell, drunk and raving, came home, often late at night, to help her to bed. It seems that many pages of Wuthering Heights and some of his poems were written during these vigils.

In 1846, Charlotte accidentally discovered the poetry her sister Emily wrote. The three Brontë sisters then decided to publish a joint book of poetry.

In the volume, Emily's poems stand out, which literary critics have considered one of the best poets in England. Anne's, though not of as high a standard, are also superior to Charlotte's, whose talents were essentially fictional. Only two copies of the book were sold, which went unnoticed; but the Brontës were not discouraged and decided to write a novel each.

In 1847 Emily published Wuthering Heights, a novel that has become a classic of Victorian English literature despite initially baffling critics due to its innovative structure.

Like her sisters, Emily's health was always very delicate. She died on December 19, 1848 of tuberculosis at age 30, having contracted a cold in September during her brother's funeral. She was buried in the church of St Michael of All Saints in Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.

Works under pseudonyms

To avoid the prejudices that fell on women writers at the time, the three sisters used male pseudonyms: Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell each sister using the initials of her name on them.

The three of them wrote novels with independent, brave and intelligent female protagonists, who lived passionate love stories. Their stories and characters were not very well regarded in their time and, if a woman signed, the censorship was greater. On one occasion Charlotte Brontë sent some verses in search of support to the poet Robert Southey and she received the following as a response: "Literature is not a woman's business and should never be." It wasn't until her books were successful that Charlotte Brontë decided to discover her true identity.

Wuthering Heights Adaptations

Wuthering Heights has been made into a movie several times since the silent days. The most valued adaptation worldwide is the one directed by William Wyler in 1939 with Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon and David Niven in the leading roles. Despite being, like all of them, a partial version of the novel, the tape manages not to betray the spirit of the story and is dramatic, romantic and alive. In 1953, Luis Buñuel made an even more faithful adaptation of the novel in Mexico, entitled Abismos de pasión, where the characters are not as seductive as in the 1939 version. Furthermore, he does not bother to adapt it to the taste of Hollywood, but above all rescues the extreme spirit of the characters. He makes no effort to make Heatchcliff "lovable," because he loves him as Brontë puts it: violent, crude, misfit, resentful, and deeply in love. He makes no effort to give Catherine a touch of "humanity" because he loves her as she is: capricious, neurotic, fragile, with all the flaws of any spoiled child, and deeply in love with her. In addition, the gap of the social difference between the two of them becomes more noticeable.