The Brontës () were a 19th-century literary family, born in the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Born to Patrick Brontë, a curate, and his wife, Maria, the sisters Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848) and Anne (1820–1849) were all poets and novelists who published their work under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively. Their stories attracted attention for their passion and originality immediately following their publication. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's Agnes Grey and other works were accepted as masterpieces of literature after their deaths.
The two eldest Brontë children were Maria (1814–1825) and Elizabeth (1815–1825), who both died at an early age. The three surviving sisters and their brother, Branwell (1817–1848) were very close. As children, they developed their imaginations first through oral storytelling and play, set in an intricate imaginary world, and then through the collaborative writing of increasingly complex stories set in their fictional world. Mary Shelley's dystopian novel The Last Man and poet Percy Shelley have been shown to have had an impact on their juvenile work. The early deaths of their mother and two older sisters marked them and profoundly influenced their writing. They were raised in a religious family. The Brontë birthplace in Thornton is a place of pilgrimage for their admirers, and their later home, the parsonage at Haworth in Yorkshire, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, annually receives hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Origin of the name At some point, Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), the sisters' father, decided on the alternative spelling with the diaeresis over the terminal to indicate that the name has two syllables. Initially, there was little certainty about which mark, if any, adorned the letter e.Collins, R.G. "The Brontë Name and Its Classical Associations", ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 14.3 (1983). https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/32674/26726 Multiple theories exist to account for the change, including that he may have wished to hide his humble origins. As a man of letters, he would have been familiar with classical Greek and may have chosen the name after Ancient Greek (). One view, which the biographer Clement Shorter proposed in 1896, is that he adapted his name to associate himself with Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was also Duke of Bronte.Clement King Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896), p. 29. The title was typically spelled without a diacritical mark — as in most English sources and the Italian language — but sometimes it was, as in some Nelson biographies and Arbëresh (one of the languages spoken in the eponymous town of Bronte in Sicily at that time). The spelling Bronté was also used by some biographers, and is also found in Branwell Brontë's long poem about Nelson, Bronté.Nelson, Jane Gray. "Sicily and the Brontë Name." Brontë Society Transactions 16.1 (1971): 43-45. https://doi.org/10.1179/030977671796481528
Family tree
Members of the Brontë family
Patrick Brontë
Patrick Brontë (17 March 1777 – 7 June 1861), the Brontë sisters' father, was born in Loughbrickland, County Down, Ireland, of a family of farm workers of moderate means. His birth name was Patrick Prunty or Brunty. His mother, Alice McClory, was of the Roman Catholic faith, while his father, Hugh, was a Protestant, and Patrick was brought up in his father's faith.
He was a bright young man and, after studying under the Rev. Thomas Tighe, won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge. There, he studied divinity, ancient history and modern history. (details of the education of Patrick Brontë). Attending Cambridge may have made him feel that his name was too Irish and he changed its spelling to Brontë (and its pronunciation accordingly), perhaps in honour of Horatio Nelson, whom Patrick admired. It is also possible that his brother William had fallen foul of the authorities for his involvement with the radical United Irishmen, leading Patrick to distance himself from the name Brunty. Having obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree, he was ordained on 10 August 1806. He is the author of Cottage Poems (1811), The Rural Minstrel (1814), numerous pamphlets, several newspaper articles and various rural poems.
In 1811 Patrick was appointed minister at Hartshead-cum-Clifton. In 1812, he met and married 29-year-old Maria Branwell at Guiseley. In 1813, they moved to Clough House Hightown, Liversedge, West Riding of Yorkshire, and by 1820 they had moved into the parsonage at Haworth, where he took up the post of perpetual curate. (Haworth was an ancient chapelry in the large parish of Bradford, so he could not be rector or vicar.) They had six children. On the death of his wife in 1821, his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Branwell, came from Penzance, Cornwall, to help him bring up the children. Open, intelligent, generous and dedicated to educating his children personally, he bought all the books and toys the children desired. He also accorded them great freedom and unconditional love, although Elizabeth Gaskell suggests in her biography of Charlotte Brontë that he may also have alienated them from the world due to his eccentric personal habits and peculiar theories of education.
After several failed attempts to remarry, Patrick accepted permanent widowerhood at the age of 47, and spent his time visiting the sick and the poor, giving sermons and administering communion. In so doing, he would often leave his children Maria, Elizabeth, Emily, Charlotte, Branwell and Anne alone with Elizabeth—Aunt Branwell and a maid, Tabitha Aykroyd (Tabby). Tabby helped relieve their possible boredom and loneliness especially by recounting local legends in her Yorkshire dialect as she tirelessly prepared the family's meals. Eventually, Patrick would survive his entire family. Six years after Charlotte's death, he died in 1861 at the age of 84. His son-in-law, the Rev. Arthur Bell Nicholls, would aid Mr Brontë at the end of his life as well.
Maria, née Branwell
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. Her father had a flourishing tea and grocery store and had accumulated considerable wealth. Maria died at the age of 38 of uterine cancer.Fraser, Lyndon (2012). Far from Home: The English in New Zealand, p. 103. University of Otago Press, Dunedin. . She married the same day as her younger sister Charlotte in the church at Guiseley after her fiancé had celebrated the union of two other couples. She was a literate and pious woman, known for her lively spirit, joyfulness and tenderness, and it was she who designed the samplers that are on display in the Brontë Parsonage museum and had them embroidered by her children. 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.
Elizabeth Branwell
Elizabeth Branwell (2 December 1776 – 29 October 1842) arrived from Penzance in 1821, aged 45, after her younger sister Maria's death, to help Patrick look after the children, to whom she was known as 'Aunt Branwell.' Elizabeth Branwell was a Methodist, though it seems that her denomination did not exert any influence on the children. It was Aunt Branwell who taught the children arithmetic, the alphabet, and how to sew, embroider and cross-stitch, skills appropriate for ladies. Aunt Branwell also gave them books and subscribed to Fraser's Magazine, less interesting than Blackwood's, but, nevertheless, providing plenty of material for discussion. She was a generous person who dedicated her life to her nieces and nephew, neither marrying nor returning to visit her relations in Cornwall. She probably told the children stories of events that had happened in Cornwall, such as raids by pirates in the eighteenth century, who carried off British residents to be enslaved in North Africa and Turkey; enslavement in Turkey is mentioned by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre. She died of bowel obstruction in October 1842, after a brief agony during which she was comforted by her beloved nephew Branwell. In her last will, Aunt Branwell left to her three nieces the considerable sum of £900 (about £95,700 in 2017 currency), which allowed them to resign from their low-paid jobs as governesses and teachers.
Children
Maria (1814–1825), the eldest, was born in Clough House, Hightown, Liversedge, West Yorkshire, on 23 April 1814. She suffered from hunger, cold, and privation at Cowan Bridge School. Charlotte described her as very lively, very sensitive, and particularly advanced in her reading. She returned from school with an advanced case of tuberculosis and died at Haworth aged 11 on 6 May 1825. Elizabeth (1815–1825), the second child, joined her sister Maria at Cowan Bridge where she suffered the same fate. Elizabeth was less vivacious than her sisters and brother and apparently less advanced for her age. She died on 15 June 1825 aged 10, within two weeks of returning home to her father. Charlotte (1816–1855), born in Market Street, Thornton, near Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, on 21 April 1816, was a poet and novelist and was the author of Jane Eyre, her best-known work, as well as Shirley, Villette, and The Professor. She died on 31 March 1855, aged 38. Patrick Branwell (1817–1848) was born in Market Street, Thornton on 26 June 1817. Known as Branwell, he was a painter, writer, and casual worker. He became addicted to alcohol and laudanum and died in Haworth on 24 September 1848, aged 31. Emily Jane (1818–1848), born in Market Street, Thornton, 30 July 1818, was a poet and novelist. She died in Haworth on 19 December 1848, aged 30. Wuthering Heights was her only novel. Anne (1820–1849), born in Market Street, Thornton on 17 January 1820, was a poet and novelist. She wrote a largely autobiographical novel entitled Agnes Grey, but her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), was far more ambitious. She died on 28 May 1849 in Scarborough, aged 29.
Education Cowan Bridge School In 1824 the four eldest girls (excluding Anne) entered the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge,Nicoll, W. Robertson (1908) The Complete Poems of Emily Brontë – Introductory Essay, p. XVI. which educated the children of less prosperous members of the clergy, and had been recommended to Mr Brontë. The following year, Maria and Elizabeth fell gravely ill and were removed from the school, later dying on 6 May and 15 June 1825, respectively. Charlotte and Emily were also withdrawn from the school and returned to Haworth. Charlotte expressed the traumatic impact that her sisters' deaths had on her in her future works. In Jane Eyre, Cowan Bridge became Lowood, Maria inspired the young Helen Burns, the cruel mistress Miss Andrews inspired the headmistress Miss Scatcherd, and the tyrannical headmaster Rev. Carus Wilson, Mr Brocklehurst.
Tuberculosis, which afflicted Maria and Elizabeth in 1825, also caused the eventual deaths of three of the surviving Brontës: Branwell in September 1848, Emily in December 1848, and, finally, Anne in May 1849.
Patrick Brontë faced a challenge in arranging for the education of the girls of his family, which was barely middle class. They lacked significant connections and he could not afford the fees for them to attend an established school for young ladies. One solution was the schools where the fees were reduced to a minimum—so called "charity schools"—with a mission to assist families like those of the lower clergy.