ABSTRACT
Emily Brontë was born on 30 July 1818, the fifth of the six children of Patrick Brontë perpetual curate of Haworth, West Yorkshire. The morbidity which contemporaries found in Wuthering Heights paralleled in the history of the family. Emily was only three when her mother died, and her two eldest sisters were dead by the time she was seven. Except for a few months at boarding schools, a brief visit to Brussels and some time as a governess near Halifax, her life spent in Haworth and its neighbourhood. Her education, therefore, was largely at home with her sisters, through her own reading and through collaborating with them in writing poetry and poetic drama. Wuthering Heights was written during 1845-46 and appeared in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. In this excerpt, extensive use is made of Haworth dialect forms. These are quite accurately represented, but their purpose is the traditional literary one of indicating social status through language choice.
