Since Emily had no interest in making contact with her fellow pupils, her only contact with other people was among the small circle of the sisters' English acquaintances. Mr Jenkins, the Anglican cleric, who had helped the sisters find the Pensionnat, invited them to spend Sundays at his house in the Chaussée d’Ixelles. However, Mrs. Jenkins stopped inviting them after a while, as their shyness and awkwardness made the visits more and more painful. They were escorted to the house by the Jenkins' sons, who found the walks tedious owing to the girls' silence. Mrs. Jenkins observed that: “Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable” when she was in their home. The Jenkins grew weary of the impenetrable, silent mask Emily presented to them.
On another outing, when Mary and Martha Taylor took the girls to visit their cousins, the Dixons, for tea, Emily remained completely silent the whole evening.
Later in July five English girls, the daughters of Dr. Thomas Wheelwright, a British doctor, enrolled at the Pensionnat. The Wheelwrights lived in the Rue Royale, not far from the Rue d’Isabelle.They too tried to make friends with the sisters. They liked Charlotte and wanted to invite her home or on excursions, but did not do so because they knew Emily would have to be invited too and would ruin the occasion. But they could not invite one sister without the other. They felt that Emily bullied her sister and held Charlotte in a possessive grip, cutting her off from everyone else by her anti-social behaviour.
The eldest Wheelwright daughter, Laetitia, who was to become a friend and correspondent of Charlotte’s later in life, wrote of her antipathy of Emily:
“….I simply disliked her from the first…She taught my three youngest sisters music for four months to my annoyance, as she would only take them in their play hours, so as not to curtail her own school hours, naturally causing tears to small children…”.
Yet another mark of Emily’s single-minded and uncompromising behaviour: again she displayed no polite social attitude and showed no inclination to make any concessions; she simply did not care if she made herself unpopular.

There is only one exception to the prevailing bad opinion of Emily. Louise de Bassompierre, a sixteen-year-old girl who was a student in the Brontës class, preferred Emily to her sister, finding her more sympathetic, kinder and more approachable. A friendship between the otherwise aloof Emily and Louise did exist, and Emily clearly valued her friendship with this Belgian girl because she gave Louise a signed pencil drawing of a damaged fir-tree. However miserable and difficult Emily must have been to others, clearly she, too, was suffering during her stay in Brussels. But she was determined to prove that she could stay away from home, however unpleasant the experience and however homesick she felt. She studied relentlessly, taking up every challenge and making use of every opportunity that offered itself. Under the guidance of one of the best music professors in Brussels she made great strides with her piano-playing and was given the post of music teacher in the Pensionnat.

Pencil drawing by Emily Brontë, 1842

Emily’s study of music on the continent changed her taste. She became fonder of piano arrangements of symphonies. On the contents page in one of her music books, with listings such as Bach, Boccherini, Clementi, Corelli, Haydn and Mozart, she concentrates on pieces from Beethoven, Glück and Handel. She also transcribed three of Beethoven’s symphonies, all marked. They show Emily’s daring and dramatic taste for composers who shared her passionate and powerful spirit. Her fondness for Beethoven, like Byron a hero of the Romantic era, might well explain her eagerness to learn German, which brought her into contact with the great German literature of the same period.