Brontë

I

Introduction

Brontë, name of three English novelists, also sisters, whose works have become respected classics.

II

The Brontë Family

The Brontës were the exceptional literary family of an Irish clergyman, Patrick Brontë, and Maria Branwell, the daughter of a prosperous Cornish merchant. Mrs Brontë bore six children, five daughters and one son and died in 1821 at the age of 37. In 1820 the Reverend Brontë had taken up the perpetual curacy of Haworth, in Yorkshire. After his wife died, her unmarried sister, Miss Elizabeth Branwell, came to live at the parsonage to care for the children. Although they appreciated her efforts, she apparently did not become a second mother to them. The two elder Brontë daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, both died in childhood of tuberculosis which they developed at Cowan Bridge, a school for the daughters of clergymen. Both Charlotte and Emily had also briefly attended the school but were withdrawn after the deaths of their sisters. Their father undertook to educate them himself, although this education seems to have been largely self-administered by his daughters, and unrestricted by him.

The children read through their father's library, and also read the local newspaper and Blackwood’s Magazine. They all began to write stories at an early age and to produce miniature magazines of their own. Charlotte and her brother, Patrick Branwell (always known simply as Branwell), collaborated in imagining and chronicling the fantastic world of Angria, which they invented in 1829, and which Charlotte continued to write about until 1839. The two younger children, Emily and Anne, created their own kingdom, Gondal, in 1834, which they continued to write about until 1845. One hundred tiny volumes of the Angria chronicles survive, but none of the Gondal stories. In the isolated parsonage with no other children, these fantasized places became very powerful for their creators.

After 1845, when the sisters were reunited at Haworth, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, all having worked away from home as governesses, they agreed to try writing as a means of earning money to support themselves. Their brother, Branwell, had fallen into dissolute habits and was unable to hold down a job between his increasingly frequent bouts of drinking. Despite the time they spent away from each other, the three surviving Brontë daughters had developed remarkably strong creative bonds with one another. Nevertheless, each sister's work is distinct. Not constricted by the conventional 19th-century limitations on female imagination, all three sisters challenged the dominant idea of “womanhood” with their intense and painful accounts of female experience. The novels and poems remain uncompromisingly truthful and intense and have continued to be widely read and studied.

III

Anne Brontë (1820-1849)

Anne was only a year old when her mother died. Unlike her sisters, she was not sent away to school until 1836, but educated mainly at home. She is thought to have been more influenced than her sisters by her aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who was a Methodist. Anne was the most docile and shy of the sisters and displayed strong religious feeling throughout her life. Her sister Charlotte described her as “naturally sensitive, reserved, and dejected”. In 1836 she was sent for one year to Roe Head school; in 1839 she became governess to the Ingham family at Blake Hall and was subsequently employed by the Robinson family in Thorp Green, near York, where she stayed for five years. Anne was a good governess and seems to have been the least unhappy of the sisters in her situation. Her time with the Robinsons was disrupted, however, by the arrival of her brother Branwell as tutor to the family: his affair with Mrs Robinson resulted in their both being sent back to Haworth in 1845.

Some of Anne's poetry was published with that of her sisters in a volume arranged by Charlotte in 1846, but the collection went unnoticed. Anne used her memories of her life as a governess for her first novel, Agnes Grey, which appeared in the same volume as Emily's Wuthering Heights in 1847. Anne used the name Acton Bell as her pseudonym. Neither novel made much critical impact. After the immense success of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) was published by an unscrupulous publisher, Thomas Newby, with the implication that it was also Charlotte's work. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall graphically depicts Branwell's alcoholism through the character of Huntingdon; a subject that was considered a shocking one for a woman writer to have chosen at this time. This novel is now considered Anne's masterpiece. Anne's only trip outside of Yorkshire was with Charlotte to visit their London publisher and thereby to prove their separate identities in 1848. After the deaths of Branwell and Emily that year, Anne, whose health had never been strong, became seriously ill. Charlotte and a friend took her to Scarborough where she died quietly at the age of 29 in 1849, leaving Charlotte and their father alone as the only surviving members of the family. Although less attention has been paid to Anne's writing than to that of her sisters, recent critical work has begun to analyse her individual talent, both as a poet and as a novelist.

IV

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)

Charlotte, like her sisters, was sent to Cowan Bridge school, which she later portrayed as the cruel institution Lowood in Jane Eyre (1847). Charlotte always believed that the deaths in 1825 of her two elder sisters were aggravated by the unhealthy conditions at Cowan Bridge and that her own health was permanently affected by her time there. Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn from the school and from 1831 to 1832 Charlotte attended a better school at Roe Head, where she met Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, who were to remain her friends for life. She taught at Roe Head from 1835 to 1838, and in 1839 she left home, like her sisters, to be a governess. Her first two positions were short and unhappy. Despite her misery, during this time she rejected two proposals of marriage, suggesting the independence of her spirit.

In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to study and teach at a boarding school, the Pensionnat Héger, in some hopes of returning to Yorkshire to establish a school of their own. Emily was homesick, but Charlotte found the experience stimulating. At the end of the year they were called back to Haworth by their aunt's death. In 1843 Charlotte returned alone to the Pensionnat to continue her studies for a further year. She suffered greatly from her unrequited love for her teacher, Monsieur Héger, to whom she wrote passionate letters after her return to England in 1844.

The sisters' project to found a school at Haworth proved hopeless, and following her “discovery” of Emily's poetry in 1845, Charlotte proposed to publish it with poems by herself and Anne in a volume entitled Poems by Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell: Charlotte's pseudonym was Currer Bell. The volume appeared at their own expense in 1846, but was hardly noticed and sold only two copies. Despite this discouraging start, the sisters resolved to continue in their efforts to earn money by their writing, and so each of them set to work on a novel, or returned to one already started.

Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was never published in her lifetime, but her sisters' novels were brought out in a joint edition in 1848 by Thomas Newby. Charlotte had begun Jane Eyre on a visit to Manchester in 1846, where she had arranged for her father to have an operation to remove a cataract from his eye. Smith and Elder published Jane Eyre in 1847 and it was an immediate success. Newby quickly and opportunistically brought out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë in 1848, and encouraged rumours that Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell were, in fact, the same person. Charlotte and Anne visited Smith and Elder in July 1848 to make themselves known as the separate authors. Their alcoholic brother, Branwell, died in September 1848, and only three months later their sister, Emily, also died. Anne died the following summer in Scarborough, leaving Charlotte alone and grieving for her lost sisters at the age of 33. Throughout this terrible time she was writing Shirley, her “industrial novel”, which appeared in 1849 to enthusiastic reviews.

In 1850, Charlotte met and befriended Elizabeth Gaskell who was later to write her biography. Charlotte's last complete novel, Villette (1853), considered by some to be her greatest, drew heavily on her memories of Brussels. In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had courted her for many years. It promised to be a happy marriage, but Charlotte died only a few months later, possibly from an illness associated with pregnancy. Charlotte was perhaps the most dynamic of the sisters; it was she who arranged her father's operation and corresponded with publishers, and it was she who had friends outside the family, unlike her sisters. The English novelist Harriet Martineau described her in 1849 “in a deep mourning dress, neat as a Quaker's, with her beautiful hair smooth and brown, her fine eyes blazing with meaning, and her sensible face indicating a habit of self-control”. Her work was occasionally criticized as coarse and vulgar and it was partly in order to counter this view that Elizabeth Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which gives a well-researched account of her friend's life, while insisting on Charlotte's fortitude and virtue in the face of great trials, and completely omitting the episode of her infatuation with the married Monsieur Héger. The Professor was also published, posthumously, in 1857. Charlotte Brontë is justly famous to this day for her challenging and psychologically exact writing, and Jane Eyre is one of the most famous novels in the English language.

Jane Eyre is the story of an orphan who is ill-treated first by her aunt and then at a dreadful school, Lowood, before she more happily becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, teaching the daughter of the mysterious and Byronic Mr Rochester. Rochester and Jane fall in love and are about to marry when it transpires that he is already married to a mad woman, Bertha, who has been confined to the upper floors of Thornfield Hall. Jane flees in dismay, coincidentally finding her cousins and discovering she is to be the recipient of a legacy. Turning down a proposal of marriage from one of her cousins, the Reverend St John Rivers, she instead returns to Rochester, alerted by what seems to be a telepathic message; Thornfield Hall has burned down, and Rochester has been blinded while trying unsuccessfully to save his wife from the blaze. Jane, now financially independent, can now marry her physically dependent former employer, Rochester; a reversal of roles which has made the novel interesting to feminist critics.

Jane Eyre is notable as a pacy, adventurous romance, although at the time it was considered an inappropriate book for young ladies to read, and indeed for a young lady to have written; Brontë's novels were accused by certain contemporaries of coarseness. The novel is also significant for its use of images from dreams, as is Villette, making them interesting precursors of the psychological novels of the late 19th century and also fruitful texts for Freudian critics.