^ Her family is alive and well, apart from her father who apparently did die of cancer as she mentioned in her journal entry. It's kind of a taboo here in the Asylum, but no, a bit of (creepy) researching shows the whole "died in a fire" thing is not to be taken too literally. EA has siblings, none of them named Anne. The name Anne itself bears a meaning, as explained in
this topic (the explanation has been confirmed by EA a while ago). So, no, although it's a possibility, I don't think Anne is necessarily Emil-y's sister and/or a reference to one of EA's real-life sisters.
HOWEVER - it crossed my mind that there might be a connection between both EA and Emil-y's families.
This is veeery delicate speculation, but here goes. In the Cutting Diary, EA mentions a posh music camp she attended when she was 12 and the cooking lessons she took while being there : "
I had walked into their territory and used it as my escapist playground because I wanted to be as far from my music teacher as possible..." (I *think* she mentionned it again recently - wasn't it in the anti-bullying campain video? - as "a camp where very weird stuff happened".) I think the allusion to abuse/rape is quite clear... Note that she says "MY music teacher", so it might be one she had had for years - and we know since "Gothic Lolita" that she had been molested as a young child.
Emil-y has been abandoned by her parents to the Conservatory when she was around five, if I remember correctly, and when she comes back to London and goes through her old neighborhood, she states that she no longer considers them her family.
The fact that EA apparently burnt all bridges with her family (somewhere around the release of
Enchant, I guess) might originate from the fact that she holds a grudge against them for leaving her at the hands of a pedophile, perhaps blinded by the success of their "child prodigy"... (On a sidenote, she also mentions, quite clearly, that they didn't take her symptoms of bipolar seriously, notably her auditory hallucinations.) Then again, this is pure speculation and this is probably as close as we'll ever get to the whole story. I am not condemning EA's family either way ; I just think it's interesting how the Victorian alternate reality could fill the plot holes in the strictly biographic part...
Edit : I just remembered - as for EA never mentioning siblings - actually, she did, briefly, in
this interview.