Emily Brontë is the least well known of the Brontë sisters. She died at the age of 30, having published one major work – Wuthering Heights a strange, rambling gothic masterpiece that puzzled and dismayed critics at the time, who were troubled by its moral ambiguity.
Like her novel, Emily was also regarded as strange solitary, uncompromising, uninterested in small talk or social conventions and either painfully shy or bluntly antisocial.
In this video I draw upon my 30 years' experience in psychiatry to explore the life and inner world of Emily Brontë trying to work out whether her strangeness was just the eccentricity of creative genius or something else – an autistic spectrum disorder perhaps.

Discovering more for yourself
There is a huge amount of information on the Brontës but less on the elusive Emily. Many of the biographies about her are out of print, but Romer Wilson’s Life and Private History of Emily is well worth a read. I really enjoyed the recent fictionalised biopic Emily and the rather more authentic To Walk Invisible. All are available through my Amazon Store. https://www.amazon.com/shop/professor...


Copyright Disclaimer
The primary purpose of this video is educational. I have tried to use material in the public domain or with Creative Commons Nonattribution licences wherever possible. Where attribution is required, I have listed this below. I believe that any copyright material used falls under the remit of Fair Use, but if any content owners would like to dispute this, I will not hesitate to immediately remove that content. It is not my intention to infringe on content ownership in any way. If you happen to find your art or images in the video, please let me know and I will be glad to credit you.

References
Fuentenebro de Diego, F., and Valiente Ots, C. (2014). Nostalgia: a conceptual history. History of Psychiatry, 25(4), 404411.
Giordano, G. (2020). The contribution of Freud’s theories to the literary analysis of two Victorian novels: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. International Journal of English and Literature, 11(2), 2934.
Girçek, N. (2010) Narcissistic Personality Disorders in the NineteenthCentury English Novel. Istanbul University Thesis. MA Thesis, Dalhousie University
Hasan, G. (2018). Defence Mechanism of the Main Characters In “Wuthering Heights” By Emily Brontë: Psychological Approach. Holistics, 10(20).
Hirtle, K. (2011). Uncanny or Marvelous?: The Fantastic and Somatoform Disorders in Wuthering Heights and Villette.
Hope, E. (1886) Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era. Walter Scott, London.
Kanner, L. (1943) Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Nervous Child, 2(3), 217250.
Levy, E. P. (1996). The Psychology of Loneliness in" Wuthering Heights". Studies in the Novel, 28(2), 158177.
Stoneman, P. (1992). Feminist criticism of "Wuthering Heights". Critical Survey, 147153.

Images
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Wellcome Foundation
British Library
The Brontë Museum
The Brussels Brontë Group
Brontë.org.uk
Other images and video samples Fair Use

Music via Wikimedia Commons
Decline by Kevin MacLeod CC4.0
Argonne by Zachariah Hickman CC0
No.4 Piano Journey Esther Abrami CC0

Video produced by Graeme Yorston and Ewelina De Leon