Emily Jane Brontë was the author of the classic novel , Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847 under the name of “Ellis Bell†(the times being what they were for women in professions). She was the daughter of a clergyman; her mother died when she was only three. She and her sisters, Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Anne (Agnes Grey), formed an unlikely literary triumvirate, isolated as they were in their motherless household in a remote parish near the Yorkshire Moors, often steeped in poverty and enduring ill health, the early death of their siblings and the neglect of their guardians. Emily was always a very private person, who chafed against the restrictive rules society imposed upon women, and found her outlet in poetry and in her famous novel. She died of tuberculosis in 1848 at the age of 30, but in her short life she managed to provide us with one of the world’s most enduring love stories, as well as a paean to the power of the human soul to survive any indignity fate places before it. Her philosophy is best expressed by a line from one of her poems that declares: “No Coward soul is mine…â€
