Emily Brontë grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, a stone village on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, where her father was the curate. Her mother died when she was three, and her two eldest sisters died as children after an outbreak of disease at their boarding school. The four who survived, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, made their own world at home. They wrote tiny books in tiny handwriting about imaginary kingdoms. Emily and Anne invented one called Gondal, and kept writing about it into adulthood.

Emily was the most private of them. She hated being away from home, and each time she tried school or work elsewhere she grew ill and came back. She loved the moors, walked them for hours with her big dog, Keeper, and wrote poems she showed to no one.

In 1845 Charlotte found one of Emily’s notebooks of poems and read it. Emily was furious at the intrusion. But Charlotte was convinced the poems were remarkable, and persuaded her sisters to publish a book together. To avoid prejudice against women writers, they used names that kept their initials but hid their sex: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Poems (1846) sold two copies.

They turned to novels. Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell, appeared in December 1847. It tells of Heathcliff, a foundling taken in by a family on the moors, and his ferocious, lifelong love for Catherine Earnshaw, through two generations of revenge. It is told by two narrators, a servant and a stranger, which makes it feel like a story overheard. Many reviewers found it savage and shocking. It is now one of the most loved novels in English.

In September 1848, their brother Branwell died. Emily caught a cold at his funeral, and it turned into tuberculosis. She refused medicine and rest, and kept doing her household tasks, until on December 19 she finally agreed a doctor could be sent for. She died that afternoon. At her funeral, Keeper walked with the mourners behind her coffin.