‘Neither Emily nor Anne was learned,’ wrote Charlotte Brontëin her ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’:

Charlotte's propaganda campaign, expressly mounted ‘to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil ’, was a clean-up operation which manoeuvred to present her anomalous sisters to the public in an immaculate state. But why should Charlotte have been so eager to assure readers that the women were unlearned? Ashamed of the brutal candour of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book which she wished had never been written, and the amorality of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte made the excuse that her sisters were innocents, who did not know what they were doing. To claim for them a kind of intellectual virginity, she had to pretend that they were unacquainted with the world. I want to establish the nature and scope of Emily Brontë's intellectual interests, in particular what she brought home with her from Brussels.

She might have been braced and fortified by the potted life history of Beethoven, her favourite composer, as set out in the eight-volume anthology of sheet music she acquired in 1844, within two years of her return from Brussels:

Such a curriculum vitae must have been tonic to any aspiring geniuses whose lives had been constricted – lacking, that is, in the privileged cosmopolitan experience supposed to equip a man for greatness.