It’s the birthday of Emily Brontë (1818-1848, #diedtooyoung), whose single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is considered one of the greatest novels in the English language.

Emily Jane Brontë was born in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children, but the family moved to Haworth in 1820 when their father became rector there. Haworth was located in the bleak bleak moors of middle England, and accordingly their mother died the next year. In 1824, the four older daughters were sent off to school at the Clergy Daughters’ School in Lancashire, which was exactly as much fun as it sounds; the rooms were cold and the food was iffy, and the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, came down with tuberculosis. They died at home in 1825 and their father yanked Emily and Charlotte out of school and brought them home as well, and after that it was all about homeschooling.

(Spoiler alert: don’t get fond of anyone in this family.)

Growing up, Brontë walked with her siblings on the moors, played games, sketched nature, and like that. The Brontë children famously created the imaginary lands of Angria and Gondal, in which many of the characters were motherless or even abandoned. Brontë made her next foray into the outside world in 1835 when she attended a school at Roe Head where Charlotte was teaching, but homesickness drove her home in three months; likewise, she lasted only six months as a teacher herself in 1838 at a school near Halifax. Her final trip from home was in 1842, when she and Charlotte went to Brussels to study in hopes of eventually setting up a girls’ school of their own; this ended when their Aunt Branwell died, and they returned home.

In 1846, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne pseudonymously self-published a volume called Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the work sold two copies. (For those of you unversed in the publication world, those numbers are quite low.) The next year, they each published a novel: Agnes Grey (Anne), Jane Eyre (Charlotte), and Wuthering Heights (Emily). Jane Eyre was a tremendous success, while Wuthering Heights was initially considered savage and coarse. Brontë has since come to be considered perhaps the greatest of the three sisters and the only poetic genius among them.

In 1848, Branwell, the only Brontë brother, died of tuberculosis and alcoholism at 31. Brontë caught a cold at his funeral, which led to tuberculosis, and died three months later at 30. Anne, devastated by her sister’s death and perhaps also a bit of a copycat, died of tuberculosis five months later at 29. Charlotte lived to the ripe old age of 39, dying within a year of her marriage.

Have a determinedly cheerful Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.