Emily’s Brontë’s guide to literary immortality
Break all conventions, write with your sisters, befriend animals — create a masterpiece for the ages.
How could it possibly be? She wrote only one novel, writing by hand for hours at her kitchen table while also baking bread and ironing. She was a terrible speller, painfully shy and preferred animals to people. She shunned marriage, craved solitude and had no close relationships outside her immediate family.
Yet in 1846 at age 27, Emily Jane Brontë completed her dark literary masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. It would be published the following year and eventually become one of the most cherished and popular books of all time.
To this day, Wuthering Heights remains one of the best-selling English novels. A recent UKTV Drama survey of 2,000 readers ranked it as the best love story ever written, beating out Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, and Jane Eyre (written by Emily’s sister Charlotte). It also finished ahead of contemporary classics such as Gone with the Wind and The English Patient.
Is there anything we can learn from Emily Brontë on constructing a story that still resonates, disturbs and thrills readers two centuries after she laid her pen to rest?
