'Wild thoughts': Emily Brontë in contemporary biofiction

Emily Brontë has proven a perpetual mystery to readers, critics and biographers, who have struggled to account for the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights since its publication in 1847. Brontë’s intense need for privacy and her limited relationships with people outside her family have also proven tantalising for writers of biofiction: she is the ideal subject because there is plenty of space to speculate about her interior life and how it might have informed her art. Twenty-first-century biofictions create a distinctly contemporary vision of Emily Brontë inflected by shifting understandings of authorship. These novels are significant not only for what they reveal about her afterlife but also for the way they function as interpretations of Wuthering Heights, given their preoccupation with attempting to find an ‘answer’ for how and why she came to write that novel.