Why did Emily Bronte write Wuthering Heights? Was it purely the product of her juvenile imagination? Or did she experience a profound and tragic relationship in her adolescent years which coloured the rest of her life and was the emotional source for both her one novel and her heartfelt poetry?Written as if in her own words, Emily's Journal explores in minute detail the possibility that Wuthering Heights was not entirely 'invented'; it gives the reader a new and exhilarating glimpse into the social circumstances which kept a young woman from the man she loved. Few biographies of Emily Bronte have reached so far into her mind - interrogating census records, parish registers, and wills - and marrying the evidence with the contents of her works. The result is truly remarkable."Sarah Fermi's extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the social history of Haworth in the early nineteenth century means that this compelling book is not just another story about the tragic Bronte family. She really does convince us that something like what she describes could have happened, and gives us an intriguing glimpse of what the Bronte family dynamics might actually have been."Dr Heather Glen, reader in English, Cambridge University, author of Charlotte Bronte, the Imagination in History, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Brontes."