Emily Bronte

Emily Jane Bront remains a mystery. Very little is known about her. There is little information, and much of what we have is contradictory. She is the author of only one novel and a few bits of poetry. This gives people little to build on. The majority of what we know about her comes from her sister, Charlotte, who is another well known author. From what is known, it would appear that Emily led an ordinary life of a nineteenth century female. She attended boarding school and learned domestic skills at home. In other ways her life was unusual and even eccentric, contributing to the originality of her great novel.
Emily Jane Bront was born on July 30, 1818 in Thornton, Yorkshire. She was the fifth child and fourth daughter of Reverend Patrick Bront and Maria Branwell Bront . When she was two years old, the family moved to Haworth. This remained her home until she passed away in December of 1848 at the age of thirty.
Both of Emily's parents influenced her literary education. Her mother published one essay, and her father published four books and a little poetry. In 1821, Maria died of cancer, leaving Emily and her four siblings motherless. Her sister, Elizabeth, came to live as a housekeeper and was responsible for training the girls in the household arts.

While at home doing housework, Emily secretly worked on poetry. In 1845, Charlotte discovered some of Emily's poems and confessed that she, too, had written some poetry. As it turned out, so had Anne. After much persuading, the poems were published in a small book entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Pseudonyms were used because the girls wanted their poetry to be taken seriously. Only two copies were sold. The failure led all three to begin work on novels: Emily on Wuthering Heights, Charlotte on Jane Eyre, and Anne on Agnes Grey. All three novels were successful and published in 1847 and 1848.
During this time, their brother, Branwell, had become addicted to alcohol and drugs, and was dying. Emily, the one closest to him, was the only one tried to help, not judge him. She beat out the flames with her bare hands when he wrapped himself in a blanket and set it on fire while he was drunk. Despite all of Emily's efforts, Branwell died in September of 1848. He was only thirty years of age. Emily caught a cold at his funeral and never left home again. She died on December 19, 1848 at the age of thirty. She never knew of the great success of her one and only novel, Wuthering Heights.

Edgar Allan Poe 2

Poe, Edgar Allan, known as a poet and critic but most famous as the first master of the short-story form, especially tales of the mysterious and macabre. The literary merits of Poe's writings have been debated since his death, but his works have remained popular and many major American and European writers have professed their artistic debt to him.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe was orphaned in his early childhood and was raised by John Allan, a successful businessman of Richmond, Virginia. Taken by the Allan family to England at the age of six, Poe was placed in a private school. Upon returning to the United States in 1820, he continued to study in private schools. He attended the University of Virginia for a year, but in 1827 his foster father, displeased by the young man's drinking and gambling, refused to pay his debts and forced him to work as a clerk.
Poe, disliking his new duties intensely, quit the job, thus estranging Allan, and went to Boston. There his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), was published anonymously. Shortly afterward Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army and served a two-year term. In 1829 his second volume of verse, Al Aaraaf, was published, and he effected a reconciliation with Allan, who secured him an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. After only a few months at the academy Poe was dismissed for neglect of duty, and his foster father disowned him permanently.
Poe's third book, Poems, appeared in 1831, and the following year he moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his aunt and her 11-year-old daughter, Virginia Clemm. The following year his tale "A MS. Found in a Bottle" won a contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. From 1835 to 1837 Poe was an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 he married his young cousin. Throughout the next decade, much of which was marred by his wife's long illness, Poe worked as an editor for various periodicals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in New York City. In 1847 Virginia died and Poe himself became ill; his disastrous addiction to liquor and his alleged use of drugs, recorded by contemporaries, may have contributed to his early death.