Status Updates From This Dark Night: Emily Bron...

Like a spouse who seems to die of a broken heart when their mate is lost, Anne sickened and passed away about five months after Emily. …..Anne turned into a saint, Emily a moor nymph. Scarborough is where Anne died, on May 28, 1849. ……The only family member not interred under the church floor, Anne was left many miles away: in the earth and overlooking the sea.

Reviews of Wuthering Heights began to trickle in. While they were on the whole unfavorable, most had at least an inkling of what Emily had accomplished. Critics just loathed the accomplishment. Coarse, strange, disagreeable went the general consensus—too gloomy, savage, and eccentric.33 They were baffled by it, puzzled.34 Curiously, all of these comments ring true, yet this is why so many would later adore the book.

Anne’s books have a more subversive bent than her sisters’, representing a Victorian woman’s working life, largely free of the melodrama and fantasy of Wuthering Heights (and, to a lesser extent, Jane Eyre).

“Charlotte never acknowledged the influence of her younger sisters’ books on her own. Indeed, she would eventually criticize their work—in print.”