By Samantha English

Content warning: mention of anxiety, depression, and emotional abuse

I fell in love with the Brontë sisters when I was sixteen. I read Wuthering Heights in a slow-churning tempest of terror and intrigue, Cathy’s ghost lingering over my shoulder as I drew complex family trees of the Earnshaw and Linton families at my kitchen table. I carried my black-penned copy of Emily’s singular work to you, Wellesley, where it sat watching me, witchlike, waiting to be joined by its sister novels. It didn’t take long. By my second semester, I was in the Nineteenth Century Novel class, combing obsessively through Jane Eyre. I wasn’t just hooked. I was haunted.