The World of Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights

1818	Emily Jane Brontë is born on July 30. The fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold is published.
1819	The Reverend Patrick Brontë, Emily’s father, is offered a lifetime curacy at Haworth.
1820	The Brontës move to Haworth.
1821	Emily’s mother dies. Her sister, their Aunt Elizabeth Branwell, agrees to raise the Brontë children.
1824	Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily are sent to the Clergy Daughters’ school at Cowan Bridge.
1825	Maria Brontë dies in May. Charlotte and Emily are taken out of school. Elizabeth dies in June.
1826	The four surviving Brontë children use Branwell’s toy soldiers to create make-believe characters. These sol diers, referred to by the children as the Young Men, are the source for numerous plays they write and perform.
1827- 1828	The Brontë children begin the play The Islanders; each picks an actual island and populates it with his or her favorite heroes. Having been influenced by their readings of The Arabian Nights, the Brontës see them selves as genii who have omnipotent power over the worlds they create. Emily selects Sir Walter Scott, his son-in-law, and his grandson as some of her heroes. Their aunt had earlier given the children a copy of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather (1828).
1831	Emily and Anne begin the Gondal saga, stories of the in habitants of an imaginary island in the north Pacific.
1834	Emily’s earliest manuscript, a Gondal story, is dated this year.
1835	Emily attends Miss Wooler’s school, but she stays only three months because her health is failing. She recovers fully at Haworth.
1836	Emily writes her earliest dated poem.
1837	Around this time, Emily leaves Haworth to teach at Law Hill School near Halifax, but she remains there for only a short while. Branwell attempts and fails to be noticed by both Wordsworth and Blackwood’s Magazine, a well respected periodical. Victoria becomes queen of England. Emily echoes the coronation with events featuring her own characters in the Gondal saga.
1837- 1842	More than half of Emily’s extant poems are written during this period. In 1839 Shelley’s Poetical Works, ed ited by Mary Shelley, is published.
1842	Charlotte and Emily attend school in Brussels under the tutelage of M. Heger. Here she is first exposed to the writings of Hugo, Guizot, Bossuet, Hoffman, Goethe, and Voltaire. Emily writes essays in French and excels at her piano lessons. The two sisters are called back to Ha worth by news of their aunt’s sudden death.
1843	Emily is housekeeper of Haworth and caretaker of her father.
1844	Emily copies her poems into two notebooks, “Gondal Poems” and “E.J.B.”
1845	Emily and Anne renew their enthusiasm for Gondal and work avidly on the saga. In October Charlotte discovers a notebook of Emily’s poems. After much resistance from her sister, Charlotte convinces Emily to have them published. Emily begins work on Wuthering Heights.
1846	Shy of publicity and aware that, as Charlotte later writes, “authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice,” the sisters publish under pseudonyms. Their work ap pears as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The three sisters work on novels; and in the evening, after all housework is done, they compare notes on their works in progress and read to each other from their latest chapters. Branwell, addicted to opium and alcohol, spends all his time at home. Charlotte grows to despise her brother
1847	Unsold copies of Poems are sent to Wordsworth; Ten nyson; John Gibson Lockhart, editor of the Quarterly Review; De Quincey; and Hartley Coleridge. The publisher T. C. Newby accepts Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey but delays their publication. Jane Eyre is accepted and published by Smith, Elder and becomes an immediate success. Now there is interest in the “Bell” writers, and Emily and Anne’s novels are published in December under their pseudonyms.
1848	In January an Examiner review criticizes Wuthering Heights for being “coarse.” Similar reviews follow. In Sep tember, Branwell dies, and at his funeral Emily catches a severe cold; it develops into a respiratory infection that ultimately leads to her death from pulmonary dis ease, or “consumption,” as it was then termed.
1850	Wuthering Heights is reissued with a biographical notice by Charlotte, in which she depicts Emily’s extremely re served nature and isolated life. Charlotte also clarifies the identities of the Brontë sisters. Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell are now known as Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, respectively.