Emily Brontë was the most cogent and beguiling of English literary voices in the 19th century.  A poet and novelist, she was born in the city of Thornton in the West Riding of Yorkshire in northern England. Sister to fellow novelists Charlotte and Anne, Emily has the distinction of having written (or rather, having “called into being”) one of the landmark novels of the Victorian period—or of any era—the searing, sublimely strange, and truly unforgettable romance, Wuthering Heights. Emily died of tuberculosis, a disease which devastatingly would come to be known as “the family malady.” She had lived all of thirty years at the time of her death.  Anne, Charlotte, and brother Bramwell would all die of the disease. Patrick Brontë—the hard-nosed father, Anglican priest, and author—survived the entire family. Although Emily abjured literary notoriety during her lifetime, employing, like her sisters, a pseudonym (Ellis Bell), she is known to posterity as one of the most signal and visionary of literary artists in the English tradition.