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All this will come as a severe disappointment to the more excitable Brontë admirers, but, in exchange for their illusions, Juliet Barker offers them a beguiling and convincing account of the family upon the moors. Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist best known for Jane Eyre (1847), the story of an independent young governess who overcomes hardships while remaining true to her principles. Emily died of the same disease on 19 December 1848 and Anne on 28 May 1849. Meanwhile, Branwell’s adult years had got off to an inauspicious start. After short stints as a portrait painter (the career for which he had received much training), a private tutor, and a career in the railways, he took up a position as a tutor alongside Anne with the Robinson family in 1843.
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It is believed that her death was caused by complications related to her pregnancy, implying that she was expecting a child at the time of her death, but sadly neither she nor the baby survived. Emily and Anne Brontë, both of whom remained single, died at the ages of 30 and 29, respectively. “Wuthering Heights” is Emily Brontë’s singular but significant contribution to English literature.
Formal education and time as a governess
The cause of her death was tuberculosis, a common and often deadly infectious disease during the 19th century. She died on December 19, 1848, at the Brontë family home in Haworth, Yorkshire. Despite her short lifespan, Emily’s influence on literature has been profound and enduring, with “Wuthering Heights” considered a classic of English literature.
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The Brontë sisters were women of their class and time—educated, impoverished, likely destined to spinsterhood—although with a twist. Motherless since they were very young, the Brontës enjoyed the benign neglect of their busy father and made the most of their freedom to develop elaborate fantasy worlds. Nonetheless, since their aging father occupied his parsonage on the sufferance of a quarrelsome congregation, they lacked security and had to find a profession. That could only mean, for the Brontës, becoming governesses or teachers of the children of the gentry. Emily Brontë, the fifth child in a family of six siblings, was born on July 30th, 1818, in Thornton, a village located in the picturesque region of Yorkshire, England. Growing up in this serene countryside, surrounded by rolling hills and breathtaking landscapes, she developed a profound connection with nature that would later influence her writing.
They spent their honeymoon in Ireland and then returned to Haworth, where her husband had pledged himself to continue as curate to her father. He did not share his wife’s intellectual life, but she was happy to be loved for herself and to take up her duties as his wife. Her pregnancy, however, was accompanied by exhausting sickness, and she died in 1855. In 1832 she went home to teach her sisters but in 1835 returned to Roe Head as a teacher. She wished to improve her family’s position, and that was the only outlet that was offered to her unsatisfied energies. Branwell, moreover, was to start on his career as an artist, and it became necessary to supplement the family resources.
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Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls, but in 1855 passed away while pregnant with their first child. At the time it was thought tuberculosis caused her death, but modern opinions differ. In 1857, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a biography of Charlotte entitled The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Patrick's wife Maria Brontë, née Branwell (15 April 1783 – 15 September 1821), was born in Penzance, Cornwall, and came from a comfortably well-off, middle-class family. She left memories with her husband and with Charlotte, the oldest surviving sibling, of a very vivacious woman. The younger ones, particularly Emily and Anne, admitted to retaining only vague images of their mother, especially of her suffering on her sickbed. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte are undeniably some of the most influential and inspirational writers in literary history.
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In choosing to write under pseudonyms, the sisters drew an immediate veil of mystery around them, and people speculated as to the true identity of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. After Emily’s and Anne’s early deaths, Charlotte Bronte added to the legend in her 1850 Biographical Notice of her sisters. Patrick Brontë was the father of six, and none of his children would live past the age of 40.
To this end, Charlotte was sent to Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Mirfield, in 1831. There have also been plenty of fictional novels inspired by the lives of the Brontës. For instance, My Plain Jane by Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton puts Charlotte Brontë in the story right alongside her most famous protagonist Jane Eyre. And The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis imagines the Brontës as a team of amateur sleuths. There have been so many books written about the Brontës, I could definitely write a whole other post just about that, so this is just to name a few!
Exposed to the elements on its hilltop setting, bitter wind would howl and whistle through its grey-stone walls. They would even become physically unwell with homesickness when they went away. But of course, the chances of them becoming sick at home were also relatively high. At 29 she contracted tuberculosis and died after a prolonged illness in 1849.
Even Charlotte, defending but also criticising her sister’s novel following Emily’s death in 1848, felt the need to apologise for the ‘rude and strange’ nature of the book, which she attributed to her sister’s rural northern upbringing. In The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, John Sutherland calls Villette the author’s most revealingly autobiographical novel. Lucy Snowe is the heroine and narrator, who becomes a teacher in a Brussels boarding school (the Villette of the novel’s title is Brontë’s fictional name for the Belgian capital). Agnes is not as spirited or well-drawn as some of the other Brontë heroines, but this short novel is a pleasant enough romantic tale which draws on Anne’s own experience working as a governess (between 1839 and 1845). The book’s main love interest is a curate, Edward Weston, and the novel contains a ‘will-they-won’t-they’ plot involving him and Agnes.
Those forays into the marketplace of female labor, though, gave them their best material. In 1839 Charlotte declined a proposal from the Reverend Henry Nussey, her friend’s brother, and some months later one from another young clergyman. At the same time Charlotte’s ambition to make the practical best of her talents and the need to pay Branwell’s debts urged her to spend some months as governess with the Whites at Upperwood House, Rawdon. Branwell’s talents for writing and painting, his good classical scholarship, and his social charm had engendered high hopes for him, but he was fundamentally unstable, weak-willed, and intemperate.
Charlotte agreed to edit the work, correcting many of the errors which had appeared in the first edition, and also making changes of her own. She undertook the melancholy task of sorting through her dead sisters’ papers to provide a selection of their poetry, and also wrote an emotional biographical notice of the two authors. Her fame had provided her with a means of entering London’s literary society, but by this time, Charlotte found that her sense of loss and the seclusion of her life at Haworth had left her unfitted to enjoy such society. Anne was anxious to try a sea cure, and on 24 May, accompanied by Charlotte and Ellen Nussey, she set out for Scarborough, a place she had loved from her summers there with the Robinson family. It was in Scarborough that Anne died, just four days later, on 28 May 1849, aged twenty-nine years. The sisters had continued to write, and in 1846 Charlotte, Emily and Anne used part of their Aunt Branwell’s legacy to finance the publication of their poems, concealing their true identities under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Any books that came their way were eagerly devoured, and the children produced their own tiny illustrated books, designed to be small enough for the toy soldiers, with minuscule handwriting to deter the prying eyes of the Parsonage adults. The experience, which provided Charlotte with a model for the infamous Lowood School in her novel Jane Eyre, ended in disaster when her eldest sister, Maria, was sent home in ill-health. Ten-year-old Elizabeth was returned home shortly after, only to die at Haworth on 15 June. On 15 September 1821, Mrs Brontė died of cancer, and her unmarried sister, Elizabeth Branwell, came to take charge of the running of the Parsonage, exchanging her comfortable home in Penzance for the harsh climate of a bleak northern township. In the early nineteenth century, the class system was a much more rigid structure than today. The Brontės’ education, in the era prior to the 1870 Elementary Education Act, when a large proportion of the population could not read, placed them socially above most people in Haworth.
They put on plays, told stories, and created journals and magazines about the make-believe realm. It’s widely accepted that Charlotte modeled the Lowood school setting at the beginning of Jane Eyre on her experiences. She blamed the deaths of her sisters on the poor conditions at the school. They subsequently moved to Haworth, where they grew up along with their brother Branwell. Their mother died while the children were still very young, and their aunt Branwell moved in to help take care of them. The North British Review simply said that ‘the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read’.
Charlotte and Emily went to London to claim authorship by the sisters, and their identities were made public. A year and a half after the move to Haworth, Maria Brontë died, crying out continuously, “Oh God my poor children—oh God my poor children! ” Four years later, the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, died of consumption, contracted at a boarding school for the daughters of clergymen. These were indeed formative experiences in the lives of the remaining siblings, but the Brontë sisters did not automatically become the silent wraiths of Mrs. Gaskell’s imagination. They contracted “scribblemania,” and poured out an endless stream of prose and verse written in very small letters on tiny scraps of paper. Charlotte and Branwell collaborated on the creation of a fictional world known as Angria—and for a time, it seems, Branwell was the better writer.
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