Emily Bronte Research Paper

Emily Brontë was born to the name Emily Jane Brontë on July 30th, 1818 as the fifth of six children. Her mother, Maria, died when she was only three years of age and therefore Emily and her siblings were left to mature without a mother at their sides. Emily’s father was a clergyman by the name of Patrick Brontë. Since the Brontë’s “father was a quiet man and often spent his spare time alone…the motherless children entertained themselves reading the works of William Shakespeare, Virgil, John Milton and the Bible and played the piano, did needlepoint, and told each other stories” (“Emily Bronte”). The time spent creating and reading great works of literature can be seen as one of the reasons for Brontë’s fluency in the art of writing. Moreover,
Her odd quirks can give rise to some of the inner workings of her imaginative mind that created Wuthering Heights. It was said about Emily that she “had an unusual character, extremely unsocial and reserved, with few friends outside her family…She had a will of iron – a well known story about her is that she was bitten by a (possibly) rabid dog which resulted in her walking calmly into the kitchen and cauterising the wound herself with a hot iron” (Gaskell). There is some resemblance to Catherine’s strange behavior in Wiuhering Heights as compared to Emily’s. One very direct similarity between the two is that Emily “…ate sparingly and would starve herself when unhappy or unable to get her own way” (Tompkins). Both Catherine, a character Emily created, and Emily herself were both very stubborn and would refuse to eat when not able to get what they wanted. Moreover, a similarity can be drawn between Emily’s “stubbornness [that] lasted to the end where she refused to see a doctor or rest while she was dying of tuberculosis” and Heathcliff’s refusal to let Hareton or himself see a doctor while Hareton was sick and Heathcliff himself was dying and brought it upon himself by not eating and going out all night. Emily Brontë was a very eccentric woman and some of these peculiarities are displayed in her rather dark tale of love and