Emily Bronte was born on July 30, 1818 in Thorton, Yorkshire, in north of England. Patrick Bronte and Maria Branwell Bronte. Her mother died of cancer in 1821 and Emily's aunt, Elizabeth Branwell moved in with the family. Emily had four sisters: Elizabeth, Maria Charlotte and Anne. She also had a brother named Branwell. .
After their mother died in 1821, the children spent most of their time in reading and composition. To escape their unhappy childhood, Anne, Emily, Charlotte and Branwell created imaginary worlds - perhaps inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). As they were growing up, the children, often played games of imagination, usually having to do with their kingdoms. Emily and Anne created their own Gondal saga, and Branwell and Charlotte recorded their stories about the kingdom of Angria in minute notebooks. They spent a large portion of their childhood playing these games and at the same time, writing poems and writing stories about their magical worlds. (Dictionary of World Biography, p.311)You would be reminded of this in Wuthering Heights, when you read about the kingdom that Heathcliff and Catherine made up as they were growing up. .
As the Bronte siblings grew up, the sisters and Branwell went their separate ways. Charlotte was excited about going out into the world but Emily preferred to live a reclusive life. Between the years 1824 and 1825 Emily attended the school at Cowan Bridge with Charlotte, and then was largely educated at home. Her father's bookshelf offered a variety of reading: the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott and many others. The children also read enthusiastically articles on current affairs and intellectual disputes in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser's Magazine, and Edinburgh Review. (Collier's Encyclopedia, p. 604) .
In 1835 Emily Bronte was at Roe Head, but suffered from homesickness and returned after a few months to the moorland scenery of home.