Emily Brontë is the author (under the alias Ellis Bell) of Wuthering Heights, one of the most powerful of the gothic-inspired novels. Her hero Heathcliff is heavily influenced by Byron. Emily is sister to Charlotte Brontë and Anne Brontë. Her brother, Branwen, used to say he could hear their older sister Maria, who died when she was seven, outside the parsonage scratching on the glass to get in. In Wuthering Heights, she becomes the child-ghost of Cathy Earnshaw. Emily was not squeamish; she was highly skilled with a gun and would cauterize her own wounds. It is said she might have survived the illness that carried her off had she not stoically resigned herself to death, deliberately refusing to eat.