1. Emily Brontë

2. Birth of a Poet
 Emily was born on July
30, 1818 in the town
of Thornton, Yorkshire of
England.
 Her parents are Patrick
Bronte, a reverend, and
his wife, Maria Branwell.
Out of six children, she
was their fifth.

3. Bronte’s Childhood
 Emily grew up in a parsonage in the
town of Haworth.
 Her mother died of cancer when Emily
was only three.
 Emily was home schooled until she
attended the Clergy Daughters’ School
at Cowan Bridge for one year. The
conditions were so horrendous there
that her two older sisters who had
already been attending the school,
Elizabeth and Maria, died of
tuberculosis as a result. Fortunately
though, Emily was taken home to be
homeschooled once again, but this
time by her father’s sister, Elizabeth
Branwell.

4. Isolation and Imagination
 Emily’s relationship with her
father was far from close-knit.
Her father dined alone and his
physical presence often
remained absent from her life.
 Although he wasn’t always there
for them, Emily’s father did
encourage creativity and artistic
goals to his children. On her
spare time when she was not
being homeschooled by her
aunt Elizabeth, Emily and her
remaining siblings created a
world of imagination.

5. The Magical Kingdom of Angria
 Using a couple of toy soldiers
and the creativity they
developed from reading
multiple novels provided by their
father, Emily and her siblings
created Angria.
 Writing the stories and poems of
Angria were a way for Emily to
express her feelings toward
human conditions such as
passions, imprisonment, adultery,
incest, murder, revenge, and
warfare.

6. Shift to Gondal
 At the approximate age of 13,
Emily, along with her younger
sister, Anne, started to focus their
time and energy for imagination
into their own world of Gondal,
distinct from Charlotte and
Patrick’s Angria.
 The stories of Gondal were
about reckless royalty, political
secrecy, love abandoned, wars,
murders, and assassinations that
all take place on an imaginary
island in the North Pacific called
Gondal. The characters often
involved motherless children, just
like Emily.

7. Detour to Roe Head
 In July of 1835, for the first time
in a long time, Emily left her
home to accompany her
sister Charlotte who was a
teacher for children in Roe
Head.
 Emily didn’t last long as she
grew homesick and missed
time to express her
imagination with her sister
Anne through the world of
Gondal.

8. Law Hill School
 In September 1838, Emily made
another attempt to break out of
her daily routine of spending her
days lost in the world of Gondal
when she became a teacher at
Law Hill School in Halifax.
 Unfortunately, the 17-hour work
day was too much for her so she
returned home after about a
year since starting. From then on,
she would remain a stay at
home daughter, doing the
chores of the parsonage, and
teaching

9. The Dream that Could…Not
 In 1842, Emily accompanied her
sister Charlotte to a Girls
Academy run by Constantin
Heger, in hopes of opening their
own school. However, after their
aunt Elizabeth passed away,
they returned home and tried to
open their school from there, but
had no success.
 Emily would remain a stay at
home daughter from that point
on, doing chores for the house,
teaching Sunday school, and
producing poetry until the day
she would die.

10. Death of a Poet
 Unsanitary conditions in Emily’s
home and contaminated
drinking water contributed to the
Tuberculosis she was diagnosed
with, ironically on the day of her
only brother’s funeral.
 Emily was offered medical
assistance plenty of times during
her sickness, but refused help
every single time. The disease
took it’s toll on her on and she
passed away December
19, 1848.

11. Wuthering Heights
 Emily’s most successful masterpiece
is a tale of love and revenge.
Heathcliff, an adopted gypsy-like
boy, falls in love with his adopter’s
daughter, and the two grow very
close. However, he runs away when
Catherine, the woman he loves,
decides to marry another for his
social status. Heathcliff returns later,
rich and educated to wreak
vengeance upon the two families
that he believed ruined his life.

12. The Destructiveness of Permanent Love
 Nelly, the narrator of Wuthering
heights, accuses the love Heathcliff
has for Catherine as immoral. His
never-changing love for her is the
source of many conflicts that occur
in the novel. However, it is not clear
whether Emily suggests the reader
to condemn this lover as guilty or to
idealize him as a romantic hero
whose love exceeds social norms
and conformist morality.

13. The Instability of Social Class
 The shifting nature of social status is
demonstrated most noticeably in
Wuthering Heights in Heathcliff’s
switch from being a homeless
orphan to a young gentleman
through adoption, to a common
laborer, and back to a gentleman
again.
 Catherine’s marriage to Edgar, a
very classy and upper-middle class
gentry man, causes her social status
to rise, which gives another
example of how one’s social class
(excluding those of aristocracy /
royalty) is vulnerable to change, for
better or worse.

14. Pairs
 Emily organizes Wuthering Heights by
arranging the characters, places, and
themes of the novel into pairs.
 Catherine and Heathcliff are similar in
many ways, and see themselves as
identical.
 Catherine’s character is split into two
opposing sides: the side that desires
Edgar and the side that yearns for
Heathcliff.
 The two houses, Wuthering Heights
and Thrushcross Grange, seem to
symbolize conflicting worlds and
values at first, but, by the end of the
novel, so many intermarriages have
happened that it’s difficult to tell the
two families apart.

15. Cycles
 Nothing ever ends in Wuthering Heights.
Alternatively, time runs in cycles, and
the tragedies of the past repeat
themselves in the present.
 For instance, Heathcliff’s moral
degradation of, Hareton (the son of
Heathcliff’s brother through adoption,
who degraded him when he was first
adopted), repeats Hindley’s original
degrading of Heathcliff. Also, the young
Catherine’s (daughter of Catherine that
Heathcliff fell in love with) mockery of
Joseph’s (a servant) serious evangelical
passion repeats her mother’s mockery.
Even Heathcliff’s second attempt at
opening Catherine’s grave to see her
repeats his first.

16. Nature vs. Culture
 Nature is represented by Heathcliff
and Catherine in particular. These
characters live by their desires, not
by reflection, consideration or ideals
of courtesy. Similarly, the house
where they grew up in Wuthering
Heights serves to symbolize a
wildness just like theirs.
 Conversely, the house of Thrushcross
Grange and the character Edgar
(the classy man Catherine leaves
Heathcliff for) characterizes culture,
refinement, convention, and
cultivation.

17. Moors
 The stress on landscape in Wuthering
Heights gives the setting symbolic
importance. This landscape is made
mostly of moors, which are wide
stretches of soggy land, the soggy
aspect making them uncultivable.
These moors contain patches in which
people could potentially drown.
Therefore, the moors serve as symbols
of the wild hazards posed by nature.
 The start of Catherine and Heathcliff’s
love is marked by the two first playing
on the moors. The moorland ironically
then transfers its symbolic associations
of danger onto their love.

18. Ghosts
 Emily presents ghosts in such a way
that whether they really exist remains
uncertain. Therefore, the realm of
Wuthering Heights can be analyzed
as a realistic one.
 Certain ghosts such as Catherine’s
spirit when it appears to Lockwood,
one of the two narrators of Wuthering
Heights, can be explained as
nightmares. The villagers’ alleged
sightings of Heathcliff’s ghost could
be canned as unproven superstition.
Whether or not the ghosts are real or
not, they symbolize the manifestation
of history within the present, and the
way memory sticks with people.

19. Discussion Question
 How are the
concepts of death
and loss illustrated in
Emily Bronte’s
Remembrance?
Include at least two
quotes from the text
to support your
answer.

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