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Emily Brontë

Agnes Mary Frances Robinson

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) is best known for her only novel, "Wuthering Heights." She was born in Yorkshire, northern England, where her father was an Anglican curate. When Brontë was three years old her mother died of cancer. At the age of six she joined her three sisters briefly at the Clergy Daughters' School, where privations and abuse contributed to the deaths of two of them. Her elder sister, Charlotte, immortalized this terrible place in "Jane Eyre." In 1846 Emily Brontë, under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, published a selection of her poetry. In 1847 appeared her dark, gothic novel, "Wuthering Heights," with its Byronic anti-hero, Heathcliff. Brontë was shy, even reclusive, and never married. In the fall of 1848 she fell ill with inflammation of the lungs, probably due to rapidly-progressive tuberculosis, and died in December of that year, aged twenty-nine. This is a short biography of Brontë written by the British poet, novelist, and critic, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857-1944). (Pamela Nagami)