Emily Brontë’s Life in Words

A name on the cover of a book does not always tell you who wrote it. In the 1800s, Emily Brontë published her writing under another name: Ellis Bell. Why did she choose it, and what did she write?

Emily was born on July 30, 1818, in England. She grew up in the village of Haworth in Yorkshire, where her father was a minister. Near the family’s home were the moors, wide stretches of open land covered with grasses and low-growing plants. Emily enjoyed walking there, and the natural world became an important subject in her poetry.

As children, Emily and her siblings created imaginary worlds and wrote stories about them. Later, Emily continued to write poems, recording many of them in notebooks. Her poems explored nature, strong feelings, and the power of imagination.

In 1846, Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne published a collection of their poems. They used the names Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell instead of their own. These were pen names, or names used by writers in place of their real names. At the time, some people did not take women’s writing as seriously as men’s. The sisters chose names that did not clearly identify them as women.