Emily Brontë, writing from Haworth Parsonage in the West Riding of Yorkshire, published Wuthering Heights in 1847 and left behind a body of poetry among the most powerful in the Victorian era, all composed within the constraints of Victorian femininity — including the physical reality of heavy undergarments and stays — and the social expectation that women would remain domestic and private. Brontë's refusal to leave Haworth, her preference for the wild moorland over the social world, and her fierce privacy represent both an embrace of and a resistance to Victorian womanhood's constraints.

Brontë's poetry — visceral, mystical, deeply embodied — was composed in a body that wore corsets and stays in the cold rooms of a Yorkshire parsonage, and this physical reality gives her images of imprisonment, wildness, and liberation particular poignancy. Her poem 'No coward soul is mine' and the verse preface to Wuthering Heights engage with freedom and constraint in terms that resonate directly with the corseted female body. She remains a central figure in the literary history of women writing within and against physical and social confinement.