Emily Brontë's first book-length publication appeared under the male pseudonym 'Ellis Bell' in this joint poetry collection with her sisters.
On 4 May 1846, the Brontë sisters published Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a slim volume of verse funded largely by a small inheritance and printed at their own expense by Aylott and Jones of London. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne adopted the gender-ambiguous pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively, concealing both their identities and their sex in an era when women writers faced significant prejudice and were often not taken seriously by critics or publishers.
Emily contributed twenty-one poems to the collection, many drawn from her Gondal saga—the imaginary world she had co-created with Anne since childhood. Critics who reviewed the volume, though few in number, singled out Ellis Bell's poems as possessing a raw, distinctive power; Charlotte herself later reflected that Emily's verse had a 'peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.'
Commercially, the book was a failure, selling only two copies in its first year. Yet its publication marked a crucial turning point: it was the sisters' first appearance in print as a unified literary trio and gave them the confidence and precedent to pursue novel-writing. For Emily specifically, this was her first known book-length publication, an early first step that preceded the far greater achievement of Wuthering Heights the following year.