Her hair, which was naturally as beautiful as Charlotte's, was in the same unbecoming tight curl and frizz, and there was the same want of complexion. She was the tallest person in the house, except her father. In 1871, Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of the Brontës, wrote of her first impressions of the fifteen-year-old Emily in Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë 2:Įmily Brontë had by this time acquired a lithesome, graceful figure.

Her stubbornness lasted to the end where she refused to see a doctor or rest while she was dying of tuberculosis. As her literary works suggest, she was highly intelligent, teaching herself German while working in the kitchen (her favourite place outside of the moors) and playing the piano well enough to teach it in Brussels. In appearance, she was lithesome and graceful, the tallest of the Brontë children (her coffin measured five feet seven inches – 1.7 metres) but ate sparingly and would starve herself when unhappy or unable to get her own way. She had unconventional religious beliefs, rarely attending church services and, unlike the other children, never teaching in the Sunday School. She had a will of iron – a well known story about her is that she was bitten by a (possibly) rabid dog which resulted in her walking calmly into the kitchen and cauterising the wound herself with a hot iron. She preferred the company of animals to people and rarely travelled, forever yearning for the freedom of Haworth and the moors. Emily had an unusual character, extremely unsocial and reserved, with few friends outside her family.

Author emily bronte