Emily Bronte part I

 I’ve often toyed with the idea of writing a novel about Emily Bronte, but so little is known about her life that it is difficult.  There have been a few works but I haven’t enjoyed any of them.  Bronte left almost nothing after her early death but her one novel Wuthering Heights and some poetry.

She wrote very few letters, had no personal friends outside the family and seemed content with a very narrow and isolated life in Haworth Yorkshire.

She was born in 1818, to an Irish father Patrick Bronte and a Cornish mother, Maria Branwell.  The family moved to Haworth when she was a small child, and soon afterwards her mother died.

The loss of her mother may have been a trauma for her, as she was very young but just old enough to have memories of Maria…

Elizabeth Branwell, Maria’s sister, came to live in the parsonage to look after the 6 children and was a good but unimaginative woman. They were grateful for her help and care but she never seems to have become very close to any of them and probably found Yorkshire cold and isolated.  

She had come from a middle class family in Cornwall who had had  a reasonable social life..and in Yorkshire, the Brontes were not that well off and did not socialise much.  Patrick was an intelligent and unusual man, who also liked to try his hand at writing fiction and poems - but he had his oddities and became increasingly reclusive after the death of his wife. He worked hard and was devoted to his clerical duties but apart from some church related socialising he lived quietly.  He ate apart from the children who were all shy and who were somewhat nervous outside the family circle. Emily seems to have resembled her father to some extent in being intelligent but unusual and reclusive.

Then when she was only 6, another disaster overtook the family.  She was sent to school with her older sisters, to a small private school for girls which was cheap but promised education for the daughter of impoverished clergymen. Patrick was conscious that although his job as curate of Haworth brought in a modest income, he had no money to leave for his girls and so they would probably have to become governesses. He wanted them to get a good education, and sent them to Cowan Bridge school.  The school was badly run however and the children were ill treated, badly fed and cared for.  Within a few months the 2 older girls Maria and Elizabeth, became ill and both were removed from the school and died at home.  Charlotte and Emily were also brought home and Patrick was reluctant to send them away again.

Charlotte never forgot the school, and blamed the people who ran it for her sisters’ death and her own poor health.  Emily said nothing about it, but it may well have a been a second trauma in her life, to have seen her sisters grow ill and die, and seen the cruelty and neglect at the school.  Her one novel touches on cruelty to children In the harshness with which Heathcliff is treated as an orphan and a “gypsy” child..

M/F