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 Both Charlotte and Emily had also briefly attended the school but were withdrawn after the deaths of their sisters.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.