The family was living on Market Street, in a house now known as the Brontë Birthplace in the village of Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England.

A shy girl, Emily was very close to her siblings and was known as a great animal lover, especially for befriending stray dogs she found wandering around the countryside.

[9] Despite the lack of formal education, Emily and her siblings had access to a wide range of published material; favourites included Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Blackwood's Magazine.

However, when Emily was 13, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives.

[14] The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage": romantic outlaws capable of more nobility, passion, and bravery than the denizens of "civilization".

[15] Similar themes of romanticism and noble savagery are apparent across the Brontës' juvenilia, notably in Branwell's The Life of Alexander Percy, which tells the story of an all-consuming, death-defying, and ultimately self-destructive love and is generally considered an inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

The change from her own home to a school and from her own very noiseless, very secluded but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices), was what she failed in enduring...

Unlike Charlotte, Emily was uncomfortable in Brussels and refused to adopt Belgian fashions, saying "I wish to be as God made me", which rendered her something of an outcast.

[33] Charlotte wrote in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' that their "ambiguous choice" was "dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because... we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice".

[36] The Athenaeum reviewer praised Ellis Bell's work for its music and power, singling out those poems as the best in the book: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint spirit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted",[37] and The Critic reviewer recognised "the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect.

[39][40][41] Except for Ellen Nussey and Louise de Bassompierre, Emily's fellow student in Brussels, she does not seem to have made any friends outside her family.

Together they shared their own fantasy world, Gondal, and, according to Ellen Nussey, in childhood they were "like twins", "inseparable companions" and "in the very closest sympathy which never had any interruption".

[44] Charlotte Brontë remains the primary source of information about Emily, although as an elder sister, writing publicly about her only shortly after her death, she is considered by certain scholars not to be a neutral witness.

Stevie Davies believes that there is what might be called "Charlotte's smoke-screen", and argues that Emily evidently shocked her, to the point that she may even have doubted her sister's sanity.

After Emily's death, Charlotte rewrote her character, history and even poems on a model more acceptable to her and the bourgeois reading public.

"[50] In the Preface to the Second Edition of Wuthering Heights, in 1850, Charlotte wrote: My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home.

A newspaper dated 31 December 1899, gives the folksy account that "with bird and beast [Emily] had the most intimate relations, and from her walks she often came with fledgling or young rabbit in hand, talking softly to it, quite sure, too, that it understood".

[58] Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte, told the story of Emily's punishing her pet dog Keeper for lying "on the delicate white counterpane" that covered one of the beds in the Parsonage.

Emily's heart was won by the unresisting endurance of the visitor, little guessing that she herself, being in close contact, was the inspiring cause of submission to Keeper's preference.

[61] In Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era (1886), Eva Hope summarises Emily's character as "a peculiar mixture of timidity and Spartan-like courage", and goes on to say, "She was painfully shy, but physically she was brave to a surprising degree.

"[66] Literary critic Thomas Joudrey further contextualizes this reaction: "Expecting in the wake of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre to be swept up in an earnest Bildungsroman, they were instead shocked and confounded by a tale of unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright barbarism.

"[67] Even though the novel received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was often condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book subsequently became an English literary classic.

[69] Emily's health was probably weakened by the harsh local climate and by unsanitary conditions at home,[70] where water was contaminated by run off from the church's graveyard.

At his funeral service, a week later, Emily caught a severe cold that quickly developed into inflammation of the lungs and led to tuberculosis.

[77] It was less than three months after Branwell's death, which led Martha Brown, a housemaid, to declare that "Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother".

The English folk group The Unthanks released Lines, three short albums, which include settings of Brontë's poems to music.

[81] In May 2021, the contents of the Honresfield library, a collection of rare books and manuscripts assembled by Rochdale mill owners Alfred and William Law, was re-discovered after nearly a century.