Attempted teaching career At seventeen, Emily joined the Roe Head Girls' School, where Charlotte was a teacher. This was the first time Emily had attended school since her few months at Cowan Bridge. At this time, the girls' objective was to obtain sufficient education to open a small school of their own. Emily struggled to adapt to life at Roe Head and left after only a few months, with Anne taking her place. Later, Charlotte ascribed this to Emily's extreme
homesickness and resistance to the routine and discipline of the school, stating that she feared Emily would have died if she had not been allowed home. . From left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. (Branwell used to be between Emily and Charlotte, but subsequently painted himself out.) In September 1838, when she was twenty, Emily became a teacher at Law Hill School, in the Yorkshire town of
Halifax. Her health suffered under the stress of the seventeen-hour workday, She did, however, continue writing, and produced several poems during this time. She returned home to Haworth in April 1839, helping the family's servant with the cooking, ironing, and cleaning. She taught herself
German from books and played the piano, becoming an accomplished pianist, as well as continuing to expand her Gondal stories. These survive as a series of poems, many of which reflect her interest in the tragic, Byronic figures that precede the creation of Heathcliff.
Brussels , teacher of Charlotte and Emily during their stay in Brussels, on a
daguerreotype dated 1865 In 1842, when she was twenty-four, Emily accompanied Charlotte to study at the Heger Pensionnat, a girls' boarding school in
Brussels, where Charlotte hoped to spend six months improving her French, Italian and German. Charlotte's further plan was for them to seek employment abroad, although she only shared this plan with Emily. Their tuition and travel expenses had been paid by their Aunt Branwell, and some friends of the family, the Jenkinses, had promised to look out for their well-being. The Jenkins family were initially welcoming but soon ceased to invite the sisters, finding Charlotte to be socially awkward and Emily monosyllabic. Nor did Charlotte and Emily fit in easily at the school: they were considerably older than their peers, they struggled with lessons that were held in French, and they were in a very small minority of Protestants in the Pensionnat. Unlike Charlotte, who made an effort to be accepted, and changed her style of dress to fit in better with her peers, Emily was not happy in Brussels and was mocked by the other students for her refusal to adopt Belgian fashions. A fellow-student, Laetitia Wheelwright, said of her: I simply disliked her from the first; her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure ... always answering our jokes with 'I wish to be as God made me'.
Constantin Heger, who was in charge of the academy, thought highly of Emily, later telling Mrs Gaskell that he rated her intellect as "something even higher" than Charlotte's, saying:She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman... impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.Fewer than a dozen of Emily's French essays survive from this period, most of which are compositions based on existing literary works selected by Constantin Heger. The two sisters were committed to their studies and by the end of the term had become so competent in French that Madame Heger, the wife of Constantin Heger, proposed that they both stay another half-year. According to Charlotte, she even offered to dismiss the English master so that Charlotte could take his place. By this time, Emily had become a competent pianist and teacher, and it was suggested that she might stay on to teach music. In this way, the sisters would be able to continue their education at the Pensionnat without paying for their board or tuition. Emily's first students in Brussels were the three young daughters of a local family, the Wheelwrights. The family liked Charlotte, but disliked Emily intensely. Laetitia Wheelwright later said that this was because Emily refused to teach the small children during her own school hours, thereby monopolizing their play time. In spite of this, Emily seems to have been happier during this period, and even made a friend; a sixteen-year-old Belgian student, Louise de Bassompierre, to whom Emily gifted a signed drawing. Unfortunately, the sudden illness and death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, forced the sisters' return to Haworth. A letter from Constantin Heger to Patrick Brontë, appealing for the girls to remain, reveals that Emily was about to receive music lessons from a celebrated teacher, and was finally overcoming her social awkwardness. In spite of this, she remained in Haworth to take over the running of the household, while Charlotte returned to Brussels without her. In 1844, on Charlotte's return, the sisters attempted to open a school at the Parsonage, but the venture failed when they proved unable to attract students to the remote area.
Poetry publications In February 1844, Emily began going through all the poems she had written, recopying them into two notebooks. One notebook was labelled "Gondal Poems"; the other was unlabelled. Scholars such as
Fannie Ratchford and Derek Roper have attempted to piece together a Gondal storyline and chronology from these poems. In the autumn of 1845, Charlotte discovered the notebooks and insisted that the poems be published. Emily, furious at the invasion of her privacy, at first refused but, according to Charlotte, relented when Anne brought out her own manuscripts and revealed that she too had been writing poems in secret. Around this time, Emily wrote one of her most famous poems, "No coward soul is mine". Some literary critics have speculated that it is a poem about Anne Brontë, while others see it as a response to the violation of her privacy. Charlotte later claimed that it was Emily's final poem, but this is inaccurate. Although it was the last poem to be transcribed into Emily's fair copy notebook, she continued to write poetry, but channelled most of her creative energy into prose. In 1846, the sisters' poems were published, at their own expense, by a small London publisher called Aylott & Jones. The poems appeared together in one volume, entitled
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. On the insistence of Emily and Anne, the Brontë sisters adopted pseudonyms for publication, preserving their initials: thus Charlotte was "Currer Bell", Emily was "Ellis Bell" and Anne was "Acton Bell". Charlotte wrote in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' that their "ambiguous choice" was "dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because... we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice". Charlotte contributed nineteen poems, and Emily and Anne each contributed twenty-one, with Emily making adjustments to some of her contributions to conceal their Gondal origins. they were not discouraged (of their two readers, one was impressed enough to request their autographs). A reviewer in
The Athenaeum praised Ellis Bell's work for its music and power, singling out those poems as the best in the book: "Ellis possesses a fine, quaint spirit and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted", and
The Critic reviewer recognised "the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect." Following Charlotte's unsuccessful attempts to generate further interest in the poems, she sent copies of the book to celebrated poets such as
William Wordsworth,
Alfred Tennyson,
Hartley Coleridge,
Thomas De Quincey and
Ebenezer Elliott. She then announced to Aylott & Jones that "C, E & A Bell are now preparing for the Press a work of fiction – consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales which may be published either together as work of 3 vols of the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vols." The three novels to which she referred were
The Professor,
Wuthering Heights and
Agnes Grey. ==
Wuthering Heights==