Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) published one novel, Wuthering Heights, under the name Ellis Bell, and died of tuberculosis the following year at thirty. Early reviewers found the book brutal and could not place its morality; it has since become one of the most quoted love stories in English, which is a strange fate for a novel in which the love destroys almost everyone it touches. Reading the famous declarations in place is worth doing — they tend to sit just before or just after an act of real cruelty, and Brontë never suggests that intensity excuses it.