Emily Bront�'s Homesickness

Abstract

she was six years old, she followed her older sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte to the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge in nearby Kirkby Lonsdale. After about six months Elizabeth and Maria contracted typhoid, and Emily went home. Ten years later in 1835, she accompanied Charlotte on her first teaching position to Roe Head, a boarding school; and for some months between 1837 and 1839, Emily herself taught briefly at Miss Elizabeth Patchett's school at Law Hill near Halifax, eight miles from Haworth. Again she accompanied Charlotte to Brussels in 1842, intending to prepare herself to run a boarding school with her sisters, but she returned to England only nine months later when her aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, died. She was then twenty-four years old, and she did not leave Haworth again. In accounts of her life, Emily Bronte did not adapt to the regimen of the school day away from home, and at the time Charlotte blamed most of her declining health on overwork and exhaustion; homesickness was a posthumous diagnosis.' Of her sister's white face, attenuated form, and failing strength during the sojourn at Roe Head, Charlotte remembered, in 1850, Nobody knew what ailed her but me [...] I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall (473). Charlotte did not use the current medical term for homesickness, nostalgia. Nor did Emily or many English persons; sometimes called the Wasting Disease (Hofer 380), nostalgia was not considered a condition to which the English, a notoriously melancholic people, were susceptible. (In works by both