Myths about the family abound, but Brontë seems to be the most mysterious figure of all of them. Much of what we know about Brontë is seen at a remove, through Charlotte's writings about her or Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte. Her other prose consists of seven essays in French, a few notes, and four birthday letters she exchanged with Anne. The plays and stories she wrote with her sister Anne about the imaginary land of Gondal have not survived. Unfortunately the student of Brontë's biography cannot rely on the signposts she left on her manuscripts and must try to reconstruct her life from a scarcity of material. Ranging from 1836 to 1846-fortunately, Brontë dated all but about a dozen of her poems-these verses reveal that she had indeed reached the heights attempted in the poems in the 1846 volume. Several factors combined to delay the publication of a complete, accurately edited collection of Brontë's poems: her sister Charlotte, who in her heavy-handed revision of seventeen unpublished poems by Brontë to accompany the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, went so far as to add lines and whole stanzas the wide dispersal of Brontë's manuscripts after their sale in 1895 by Charlotte's widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls and finally the difficulty in reading the manuscripts, some of which Brontë wrote in a tiny, crabbed script on irregular bits of paper. Hatfield in his noteworthy edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë (1941).

However, Brontë's twenty-one contributions to Poems represented only a fraction of the nearly two hundred poems collected by C. The writer of the review in the 4 July 1846 Athenaeum, for example, noted her 'fine quaint spirit' and asserted that she had 'things to speak that men will be glad to hear,-and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.' It seemed in 1848, the year of Emily's death, as if this potential were never to be realized. The three notices were positive, however, especially with respect to the contributions of Ellis Bell-Emily Brontë.

The only poems by Emily Brontë that were published in her lifetime were included in a slim volume by Brontë and her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), which sold a mere two copies and received only three unsigned reviews in the months following its publication.

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