Emily Jane Brontë was born 30 July 1818, fifth child of the Reverend Patrick Bronte and Maria Brontë. Maria died when Emily was only three. Said to be the brightest, most intense, and most difficult of the Brontes. Emily was raised in a strict Anglican home by her clergyman father and a religious aunt after her mother and two eldest siblings died. The Bronte's had five daughters, and a son, Branwell.

In 1824 Emily and Charlotte join their older sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, at the infamous Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire, which is depicted in Jane Eyre, where they had the run of their father's books, and were thus nurtured on the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Sir Walter Scott and many others.

She briefly attended school with her elder sister Charlotte, but spent most of her formative years at home in Yorkshire. To escape their unhappy childhood, Anne, Emily, Charlotte and their brother Branwell created imaginary worlds. With her sister Anne, to whom she was particularly close, Emily created a fantasy land inspired by the reading of works such as Arabian Nights. She was a silent and reserved person, without close friends.

In 1835 Emily attended school at Roe Head, but suffered from homesickness and returned after a few months to the moorland scenery of home. In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. To facilitate their plan to keep a school for girls, Emily and Charlotte Brontë went in 1842 to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned on the same year to Haworth, where she stayed for the rest of her brief life.

Today remembered chiefly as the author of the eighteenth-century romance Wuthering Heights (1847), set in her native Yorkshire. Emily's novel did not gain the immediate success that Charlotte's Jane Eyre did, but it has attained later fame as one of the most intense novels written in the English language. She wrote nearly two hundred poems.

After three years of excessive indulgence in alcohol and drugs, Branwell, Emily's brother, dies on September 24. Emily takes ill (caught a cold that deteriorated into tuberculosis) at his funeral, refuses all medical aid, died on December 19, 1848 at the age of 30. She is buried beside her brother, mother, and other sisters at Haworth parsonage. (Anne died the following year, and in 1855, Charlotte died during her pregnancy).