Emily Bronte’s life was short, pitifully so, and it was and is very much of a mystery. Her biographers and literary critics are puzzled by her, and as Margaret Lane points out, she just kept herself to herself to such an extent that it is nearly impossible to know what happened to her or why she was the way she was.
We do not know why she became so reclusive or why her one novel is so hard to understand.
Lane notes the very bizarre theories that some critics and biographers come up with, and admits that she prefers critics who admit that they do not know and base their ideas on the work and the few facts known, who do not try to theorise too much.
We know almost nothing of Emily. We only have access to a few letters and as she had no friends outside her family, there was no one whom she confided in. Her only times spent away from home were when she went to school for a while to Miss Woolers’- the school where Charlotte had received her education, the time she went to Brussels with her sister, to attend a well-known school and learn French, and when she spent a short time teaching at a school called Law Hill.
Generally -she seems to have been unhappy away from Yorkshire. She left Miss Wooler’s school, as a girl, because absence from her home was making her ill. Later, she stayed for some time in Brussels and at Law Hill but it seems that she wasn’t very happy in either place and only stayed out of duty. While Charlotte found Brussels interesting, and went back there after the death of her aunt, Emily returned to Haworth and never left it. She had acquired some education and knowledge of French and that was enough for her. On her aunt’s death -the 3 girls all inherited a little money and she kept house at the Parsonage, from then on. She had sufficient money not to have to seek a job.
Charlotte still wished for engagement with the larger world, but Emily was contented with her home, and absolutely refused to leave it.
Margaret Lane thinks that we simply don’t know what caused her to withdraw from the world, to avoid relationships with people outside her family, and to refuse to go away from home. But even within her family, she was not always very friendly, quarrelling with Charlotte when the latter found her poems and wanted her to publish them... When she did live away from home, she wasn’t greatly liked. Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, Charlotte’s 2 good friends, seem to have gotten on reasonably well with her, but they weren’t close.
When she was forced to mix with others, at the Brussels school; she was so odd in her ways and off-putting that mostly people did not find it easy to develop any relationship with her. M Heger, husband of the headmistress, who taught both young women, admired Emily but thought her egotistical. She didn’t appear to like him very much either... Charlotte wrote that “Emily and he don’t draw well together at all”.
It is possible, I think, to theorise that perhaps her mother’s early death, made her suspicious of her fellow humans. Perhaps she turned to her writing, her inner world, her mystic conception of God and also to loving animals, rather than trying to make friends with the outside world. She lost her mother when she was only 3, and at 6, was then sent to the school where her older sisters as a result of bad hygiene, “starvation rations” and generally harsh treatment.
Charlotte perhaps remembered her mother and her mother’s sustaining affection better and was willing to try and relate to other people, but Emily had less memories of this and probably was traumatised by the Cowan Bridge School. She may have found it safest to retreat to her Haworth home and the family members whom she trusted and to refuse to ever come out of it, willingly again... And she also may have found human beings outside her family so hard to understand, or so cruel (if one thinks of the Cowan Bridge experience) that she didn’t want to trust any of them or try to love anyone.
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