Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë! (Born July 30, 1818)
As children, the literary sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, along with their brother Branwell, created fantasy kingdoms with names like “Gondal” and “Angria,” and made them the settings for elaborate, ongoing poems and stories. This “juvenilia”—a fancy term for the work artists produce in their younger years—provides evidence of a remarkably imaginative family, though the sisters took their youthful creativity in different directions (while, Branwell fell into alcoholism in London). Charlotte (1816-1855) left behind the Angria sagas for the realism of Jane Eyre (1847). Anne (1820-1849) published semi-autobiographical fiction like Agnes Grey (1847). And middle sister Emily (1818-1848) drew on the melodramas of Gondal and Angria to create the tempestuous novel Wuthering Heights (also in 1847!) 
1. None of the Brontë sisters (nor their brother and two older sisters) lived to the age of forty. What disease killed all of them?
2. Which two characters fall passionately (and destructively) in love in Emily’s Wuthering Heights?
Here is the site of the Brontë Parsonage Museum: http://www.bronte.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=35
Read more about this remarkable family in Don’t Know Much About Literature.
Answers
1. Tuberculosis (known in their day as “consumption”). Charlotte’s death may have been hastened by complications of pregnancy. Emily died in 1848, in the year after Wuthering Heights was published.
2. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.
