Other family members become satellites that revolve around Planet Emily. O’Connor may dislike the label, but the film’s weakness is the biopic’s perennial flaw: the oversimplification of events and characters to serve a central protagonist’s personal development. Nevertheless, Emily is marketed around the concept of “authenticity,” perfectly in keeping with the genre’s gestures towards emotional truth over fact. By 1849, Branwell, Emily, and Anne were dead from tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights and Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, came out together in three volumes shortly afterwards, a fitting tribute to her and Emily’s particular intimacy. At their own expense, the sisters compiled a volume of poetry under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. In 1845, when they were all living in their family home of Haworth Parsonage, Charlotte discovered Emily’s poems (an invasion of privacy that initially outraged Emily). The three were writers since childhood, creating imaginary worlds with their brother Branwell. Alongside such mythologization, the sisters’ arduous path to publication was a remarkable collective effort. Yet too often they are still seen as unworldly spinsters in a desolate Yorkshire landscape, warmed by their surprisingly fiery imaginations. Lucasta Miller argues in The Brontë Myth (2001) that the Brontës are constantly reinvented to suit each generation. A trio has a powerful allure, summoning all the number’s witchy connotations. “We are three sisters,” Charlotte famously said when their anonymity could no longer be hidden from her publisher.

More than merely siblings, the Brontës are a literary sisterhood. Joined by their older sister, in this attitude they wrote three iconic novels: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). A version of it appears in almost every onscreen biographical depiction of the Brontës. With quick ink strokes, Emily created a scene that has become an essential part of Brontë iconography: women writing together at a table. In her 1837 diary paper, Emily Brontë drew a sketch of herself from the back, sitting across from her sister Anne in voluminous sleeves, their private papers strewn about them.

Books written by emily bronte