Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Emily Brontë (In Order)
Emily Brontë published exactly one novel in her lifetime, and it happens to be one of the most read books in the English language. What surprises most people is how small her actual output was: one shared poetry collection, one novel, and a much larger body of poems that only became public after her death. This page covers all three, in the order they came into the world, with what each one actually is and isn’t.
By Lisanne Swart · 3 books · 1846–1941 · Updated July 2026
The short answer
She wrote one novel, not several
Wuthering Heights (1847) is her only novel. There is no second Emily Brontë novel, published or lost — despite what some fan theories claim.
Most of her poetry was published after she died
She wrote almost 200 poems, but only shared 21 of them publicly during her lifetime, as Ellis Bell.
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton BellJoint collection
Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë self-published this shared volume of verse in May 1846, paying roughly £50 out of their own pocket. Emily contributed 21 poems under the name Ellis Bell. Only two copies sold, but the few reviewers who noticed it — including one in The Athenæum — singled out Ellis’s poems as the strongest in the book, praising a “fine, quaint spirit” years before anyone knew Ellis was a woman. You can find modern editions that pair this collection with Wuthering Heights, such as this one from bol.com.
Wuthering HeightsHer only novel
Brontë began Wuthering Heights in 1845 and spent more than a year trying to find a publisher before it appeared in December 1847, again as Ellis Bell. Set on the Yorkshire moors, it follows Heathcliff, a foundling raised by the Earnshaw family, and the destructive, generation-spanning revenge he takes after losing Catherine Earnshaw to a more respectable marriage. Early reviewers were largely baffled or repelled by its brutality; it took decades, and Charlotte’s 1850 posthumous edition crediting Emily by name, for the novel to be read as the singular work it’s now considered. It remains in print in dozens of editions — you can find current ones through Waterstones or as an audiobook via Audible.nl.
The Complete Poems of Emily Jane BröntePosthumous, ed. C.W. Hatfield
Brontë wrote close to 200 poems in her lifetime, most of them tied to Gondal, an imaginary world she and Anne invented as children and kept writing about into adulthood; almost none of the Gondal prose survived, but many of the poems did. Charlotte’s heavy-handed 1850 revisions of Emily’s unpublished poems delayed an accurate edition for decades, and it wasn’t until 1941 that scholar C.W. Hatfield assembled and restored the full body of work from surviving manuscripts, which had been scattered after being sold off in 1895. It’s the closest thing that exists to Emily Brontë’s complete poetic output, and the edition most literary scholars cite today.
Frequently asked questions about Emily Brontë’s books
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