While Emily Brontë is mostly recognized for the single novel she published during her lifetime, Wuthering Heights, she also received critical praise for her poetry. She wrote verse quite often from her twenties onward, but it was only with the encouragement of her sisters that she pursued the publication of some of it. In 1846, along with her sisters Charlotte and Anne, Brontë contributed to a collection of poetry titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. While all three sisters had been writing for years, this particular book's road to publication was a complicated one.
In February of 1844, Brontë began to recopy some of her older poems into two separate notebooks. One was titled "Gondal Poems," seeming to fit into a body of work she had composed about the fictional land of "Gondal," and the other had no title. The following year, Brontë's sister Charlotte came upon these poems and was immediately struck by what she saw as their brilliance. Charlotte went to Emily to ask about the possibility of publishing some of these poems. She was initially offended and deeply upset by this invasion of her privacy. However, with the encouragement of Charlotte and Anne, Emily agreed to contribute her poems to a volume of their collected work. They each selected poems for the book and began to format and edit them for release. They published their collection with their own money and used the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, to conform to the gender restrictions of the time. The collection was positively reviewed by both The Athenaeum and The Critic, with particular attention paid to "Ellis'" (Emily's) works. This reception was an early indication of the acclaim Brontë's works would go on to receive.
