Life impacting writing...
Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights
Emily suffered tremendous homesickness whenever she left Haworth -- on one occassion when she and Charlotte were away from home (studying, I believe, though they may have been teaching..), Charlotte had to send Emily back to Haworth because she was afraid she was slowly dying from homesickness (Charlotte wrote: "I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall.") This is represented in WH by Catherine's conversation with Nelly where she says she dreamed she was unfit for Heaven and cried when she was there -- Catherine and Emily both belonged on the Yorkshire moors. Also, it is a generally accepted theory that Hindley was modelled (to an extent) after Emily's brother Branwell. Branwell gambled and drank away some of the Brontė's money and ultimately died in despair. Emily was very fond of animals and nature (some of the stories about her behaviour with animals are legendary!) and animals play a significant role in WH. One of Emily's most beloved pets was her dog, Keeper -- she absolutely adored him. The Brontė family suffered a lot of deaths in the family (chronology: http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Bronte-Emily-Chro.html), and the parental figures were somewhat weak (although this is arguable -- but many people do believe that Patrick Brontė was a very distant parental figure, and that Emily's aunt Elizabeth Branwell was overbearing). Death and parental figures are important to the novel. The following is from a letter Charlotte Brontė wrote after Emily's death: "Well - the loss is ours - not hers, and some sad comfort I take, as I hear the wind blow and feel the cutting keenness of the frost, in knowing that the elements bring her no more suffering - their severity cannot reach her grave - her fever is quieted, her restlessness soothed, her deep, hollow cough is hushed forever..." You can easily draw parallels between that and WH.
