Emily Bronte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, on July 30, 1818. Her father was the rector of Haworth from 1820. After their mother died in 1821, the children spent most of their time in reading and composition. To escape their unhappy childhood, Anne, Emily, Charlotte and their brother Branwell created imaginary worlds. Emily and Anne created their own Gondal saga, and Branwell and Charlotte recorded their stories about the kingdom of Angria in minute notebooks. Between the years 1824 and 1825 Emily attended the school at Cowan Bridge with Charlotte, and then was largely educated at home.

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 Bront? 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.

Emily Bronte's only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), 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. In contrast to Charlotte and Anne, whose novels take the form of autobiographies written by authoritative and reliable narrators, Emily introduced an unreliable narrator, Lockwood. .

Emily Bronte died of tuberculosis on December 19 1848, having caught cold at her brother Branwell's funeral in September. Ironically, after the appearance of Wuthering Heights, some skeptics maintained that the book was written by Branwell, on the grounds that no woman from such a circumscribed life, could have written such a passionate story. In 1850, Wuthering Heights was reissued with a selection of poems and a biographical note from Charlotte Bronte. In 1941, the Hatfield edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte was published.