Emily Bronte Wrote One Novel and Vanished
Quick answer: Emily Bronte published Wuthering Heights to baffled, hostile reviews and died a year later at 30. How a single novel from a parsonage became immortal.
The sales figure is the kind writers tell each other in the dark: two copies. That is how many copies of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were widely reported to have sold in 1846, a slim volume the Bronte sisters paid to publish themselves with money left by their aunt. Ellis Bell was Emily Bronte, and the reviews, such as they were, singled out her poems as the volume's most striking. It did not matter. Almost nobody bought the book, and nobody knew the poets' real names.
Within three years Emily would publish one of the strangest and most powerful novels in the English language, watch it bewilder and repel its first critics, and die at 30 without any idea that she had written a permanent book. Her story is the extreme case of a question every writer eventually faces: what if the verdict you get in your lifetime is the wrong one?
The poem
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
Emily Bronte, 'No Coward Soul Is Mine' (1846)
The Invisible Apprenticeship
Emily Bronte published almost nothing, but she had been writing nearly all her life. With her sister Anne she built Gondal, an imaginary kingdom sustained for years in poems and prose chronicles, most of it now lost. This was not idle play; it was a private workshop in which she practised dramatic voice, extreme emotion and narrative sweep with no audience at all. Many of her finest poems began as speeches by Gondal characters.
The outside world touched her lightly. She left Haworth parsonage a few times, for school and briefly to study in Brussels, and by most accounts was miserable away from the Yorkshire moors, coming home as soon as she could. The material of her one novel was not gathered from wide experience. It was compressed from a small, fierce inner life, which should comfort any writer who fears their world is too small to write from.
A Sister Opens the Wrong Notebook
The chain of events that dragged Emily into print began with an intrusion. In 1845 Charlotte came across one of Emily's private notebooks of poems and read it without permission. Charlotte later wrote that the verses stirred her deeply, that they were unlike the poetry women usually wrote, condensed, terse and vigorous. Emily, by every account, was furious. It took days to calm her and longer to persuade her that the poems deserved readers.
The result was the 1846 Poems, published under androgynous pseudonyms because, as Charlotte later explained, the sisters suspected authoresses were liable to be looked on with prejudice. Emily's contributions included No Coward Soul Is Mine, now one of the most anthologised poems of its century. Two copies sold. The sisters responded to this near total silence by each writing a novel.
Wuthering Heights Meets Its First Readers
Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby, a publisher of doubtful practices who, it is widely reported, required the sisters to advance him fifty pounds against sales. It appeared as by Ellis Bell, bundled with Anne's Agnes Grey to fill out the customary three volumes. Charlotte's Jane Eyre had come out two months earlier from a better publisher and was already a sensation, which meant Emily's book arrived in her sister's shadow and was sometimes suspected of being an earlier, cruder effort by the same hand.
The reviews were not uniformly savage, but they were baffled and often repelled. Critics granted the book rude power while condemning its brutality and moral wildness; one much quoted early review wondered how a human being could have written such a book without doing themselves harm. The novel that schoolchildren now study as a classic struck its first professional readers as something feral that had got into the house.
One Year Later
Emily Bronte died on 19 December 1848, a year after her novel appeared, of tuberculosis, at 30. The manner of her dying has become part of the legend, and the sources here are Charlotte's letters: Emily refused to see doctors through her final months, kept doing her household tasks as her strength failed, and consented to medical help only on the last day, when it was far too late. Whatever she thought of her book's reception, she left no comment on it that survives.
She never knew. That is the hard center of this story and there is no softening it. She saw the two copies, the puzzled reviews, the shady publisher, and then she was gone. Every posthumous laurel, and there is now more than a century and a half of them, landed on a grave.
How the Book Outlived Its Verdicts
The rescue began with Charlotte, who in 1850 brought out a new edition of Wuthering Heights under Emily's real name, with a biographical notice and a preface defending the book while half apologising for its ferocity. Through the Victorian era the novel's reputation climbed slowly; readers and critics kept returning to it, unable to file it away. By the twentieth century the reversal was total: the book once called coarse and disagreeable was being ranked among the greatest novels in the language, and Emily's small body of poems had secured her a separate reputation as a major poet.
The first verdict, in other words, was simply wrong, and it was wrong because the book was genuinely new. Reviewers had no shelf to put it on. Work that resembles nothing gets punished before it gets canonised, and the interval can be longer than a life.
What Emily's Story Offers a Doubting Writer
Take the practical lesson first: Emily's genius was real, but it reached us through other people's stubbornness. Charlotte opened the notebook, pushed for the poems, and reissued the novel after Emily's death. Work locked in a drawer needs an advocate, and the surest advocate is the writer, while they are alive to do it. Sending work out, entering it, showing it, is not vanity; it is how books survive.
The second lesson is about verdicts. If the first readers of Wuthering Heights could miss it, the first readers of your work can miss yours, and, equally, they may be right and you will improve. You cannot know which in the moment, so the only sane policy is Emily's own practice scaled down: keep writing at full intensity, and let the judgement be somebody else's job. A contest that returns a score and reads every entry, as Writory's monthly one does, at least ensures the verdict arrives while you can still use it.
What poets can take from this
- Keep a private project with no audience, as Emily kept Gondal; it is where your real voice rehearses.
- Do not measure the worth of your work by early sales; two copies is a data point, not a verdict.
- Find one trusted reader who will fight for your work the way Charlotte fought for Emily's.
- If reviews of your work are confused rather than dismissive, look closely: confusion sometimes means you made something new.
- Publish and enter work while you are alive to benefit; posthumous fame is a bad retirement plan.
- A small life is not a small subject; Emily built a permanent novel out of one landscape and one household's worth of feeling.
Try it yourself
Write a poem rooted in the one landscape you know better than anyone else, and let a single wild, ungovernable emotion move through it the way weather moves through moorland.
Questions
How many books did Emily Bronte write?
One novel, Wuthering Heights, published in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, plus a body of poems, some published in the 1846 volume she shared with her sisters. She died in December 1848, so any second novel, if one was begun, has never been found.
Was Wuthering Heights successful when it was published?
No. Early reviews were largely baffled or hostile, granting the book power but condemning its brutality, and it sold modestly through a disreputable publisher. Its standing rose after Charlotte's 1850 reissue and kept rising until it became a fixture of the English canon.
How old was Emily Bronte when she died?
She was 30. She died of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848, a year after her only novel appeared, and famously refused medical help until her final day.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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