The Brontes
‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.’
This quotation is taken from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the words are spoken by the heroine, Jane, at the moment she decides she must leave her employer, Mr Rochester – the man she loves and who loves her. In many ways, it sums up everything the Brontë sisters stand for and have come to represent. The books of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë speak to us across the years with tremendous power and urgency, about passion, self-sufficiency, and courage.
Charlotte (b. 1816), Emily (b. 1818), and Anne (b. 1820) moved to the parsonage in the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, together with their siblings Branwell, Maria, and Elizabeth, when their father, Patrick Brontë, was appointed as curate. Their mother Maria died not long after their arrival in Haworth when Charlotte was only 5 years old, and their Aunt Branwell came to live with them. The four older sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily, were sent to a school for clergymen’s daughters at Cowan Bridge in 1824 but conditions at the school were harsh and Maria and Elizabeth both contracted tuberculosis there and died in 1825. After this terrible event, which Charlotte would draw on for the scenes at Lowood school in Jane Eyre, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne were taught at home, where they discovered a passion for storytelling, inventing the rival fantasy worlds of Angria (Charlotte and Branwell) and Gondal (Emily and Anne), and creating tiny hand-written books which they filled with their writing.
Following Charlotte’s time as a governess at Roe Head school, in 1842, she and Emily were enrolled at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, a girls’ school run by Claire Héger and her husband, esteemed literature professor Constantin Héger, to finish their education and equip them with the skills to enable them to set up their own school in Haworth.
Charlotte’s time in Brussels proved to be a pivotal and tumultuous period in her life: she worked closely under the tutelage of Monsieur Héger, finding him a demanding, passionate, and inspiring teacher (although Emily did not feel the same way about him). Charlotte returned to Brussels without Emily after the death of Aunt Branwell and it is thought that she developed intense feelings for him, which eventually led to her estrangement from Madame Héger and her return to Haworth. She sent several emotional letters to Monsieur Héger to which she received no response and she never went back to Brussels, but not long afterwards she wrote her first novel, The Professor (published posthumously in 1857) and later Villette, published in 1853, both of which focus on the love between a professor and his pupil. The depths of emotional turmoil she must have experienced on her return home to her quiet life in Yorkshire can only be imagined.
It was Charlotte who initiated the sisters’ career as published writers, after coming across Emily’s poems one day and recognising their extraordinary power. Emily was an extremely private person but Charlotte managed to persuade her to allow the poems to be published. Spurred into action, the three sisters put together a volume of poems, which were published at their own expense in 1846 under the pen-names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. At this point, they began to attract attention from a few critics, who were intrigued as to the identities of the Bells, and whilst none of them seemed to guess that they were women, there was some speculation about who they might be.
What followed was to be the beginning of the literary fame which Charlotte had always craved – ‘to be forever known’, as she had written to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey in the 1830s, in a letter asking for his advice. In his response, he had warned Charlotte against her ambitions, with the words ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’.
Emily’s unique and extraordinary novel Wuthering Heights, set on the moors and telling the epic tale of Heathcliff and Cathy’s great, destructive passion, was accepted for publication in 1847, alongside Anne’s book Agnes Grey, in which she drew on her often traumatic experiences as a governess. But it was Jane Eyre which was published first and the response to it was immediate and overwhelming: tales of people being stopped in their tracks whilst reading, including the famous author Thackeray, abounded. The story of Jane, a poor, orphaned governess who falls in love with her employer Mr Rochester, a man who has a dark secret in his life, was irresistible – above all, it seemed that never before had the passion and desire of a woman to be accepted on her own terms been so forcefully expressed in literature.
And still, no one knew who Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were…
Whilst Wuthering Heights had been widely admired, it had also shocked its readers and was described as ‘coarse’. The sense of shock was compounded by the publication of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is the story of Helen Graham, a young woman who bravely leaves her violent, alcoholic husband. This, of all the novels, scandalised the public, even when its writer was presumed to be a man – Charlotte resorted to trying to suppress its republication, calling it a naïve ‘mistake’, once the identity of the sisters was finally openly revealed. Sadly, this was not to be until after the tragic deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne within a matter of a few short months of each other, in 1848 and 1849, from tuberculosis. Charlotte herself died in the early stages of pregnancy, within a year of her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1855.
Of the three novelists, Anne has been the most frequently overlooked, but her less idealistic, more radical work is finally being appreciated for its unflinching realism. Without a doubt, her novels deserve their place next to the remarkable work of her sisters – Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre remain two of the most widely read and admired works in all of English literature and the spirit of Charlotte, Emily and Anne lives on in their novels.
*Bonus fact* The parsonage and village of Haworth featured in the original film of The Railway Children.
Further reading:
Visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum website
A wonderful filmed introduction to the National Theatre production of Jane Eyre~ Jane Eyre Introduction. Devising from a Classic Novel. National Theatre at Home.
Penguin articles - Anne Bronte the radical sister overlooked by history; How sibling rivalry mad Anne the other Bronte; Claire Harman on the Brontes