Saturday, April 27, 2024

The Brontë Sisters: How Emily, Charlotte & Anne Changed The World

charlotte sisters

As adults, the sisters were limited by the mores of the time period to search for jobs within the education system that had so traumatized them. Once of an age to support themselves, none gained early economic success. Emily Brontë attempted work as a live-in governesses, but was dismissed for her sharp tongue. With wider options, Branwell Brontë sought employment as an artist, but returned home in debt. Due to their forced or voluntary isolation, the Brontë sisters constituted a separate literary group that neither had predecessors nor successors.

Denunciation of boarding schools (Jane Eyre)

Emily Disregards the Most Compelling Part of the Brontë Sisterhood - Literary Hub

Emily Disregards the Most Compelling Part of the Brontë Sisterhood.

Posted: Tue, 31 Jan 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Publishing under the androgynous pen names Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell respectively, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë gave us some of the most memorable characters in all of English literature. Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, Mr Rochester, and Jane Eyre have been immortalised on screen by some of the greatest actors in Hollywood. These early experiences of loss profoundly impacted Anne and influenced her writing through her exploration of themes including mortality and grief.

charlotte sisters

Related: Prince William and Kate Middleton’s Sweetest Moments With Their Kids

Two in five children died before the age of six, and the average age of death among adults was 25. "Haworth was a busy industrial West Riding township, not the remote and backward village of Brontë legend," Juliet Barker, author of The Brontës, reveals. "The family had access to music, art, libraries and lectures." And then there were the Moors. From the parsonage, standing at the high point of the village, the Brontës could look out over vast swathes of dramatic moorland.

When Prince Louis was born

Of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte ( ) was the most prolific, writing four novels which were published between 1847 and 1857 (her final novel was published posthumously). This was the second of her novels to be published, in 1849, after Jane Eyre two years earlier. Anne’s relative obscurity can be attributed in part to her premature death. Her works were also considered less sensational and lacked the gothic elements that made Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights widely popular.

Early life

Their father, Patrick, was an Anglican clergyman who was appointed as the rector of the village of Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors. After the death of their mother in 1821, their Aunt Elizabeth came to look after the family. This tale of a virtuous governess is thought to be highly autobiographical of Anne's life. Though her sisters' novels have always received more attention, Agnes Grey has plenty of groundbreaking credentials. For instance, it was the first novel to star a plain, ordinary woman as its heroine (Jane Eyre is often credited with this, but Agnes Grey was written first).

The Best Books by Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë – Ranked

charlotte sisters

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.

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.

Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, followed in June 1848. To dispel rumours of the ‘Bell brothers’ being a single person, Anne and Charlotte visited their publisher, George Smith, in London a month later. Charlotte gave Anne lessons on her return from Roe Head school, and subsequently returned to Roe Head as a teacher. By then Emily was a pupil (her place financed by Charlotte’s teaching), but homesickness eventually led to her withdrawal; Anne took her place, aged 15.

The young royal looked after her brother Prince Louis

While hearts are heavy across the state, the loss of four officers hits harder than most for their brothers and sisters in blue. Back in 2021, the young Princess was with her doting mother, Princess Kate, and she was her eyes and ears when she and her brothers were watching the Pageant on the last day of Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee Celebrations. Just a few days after little Louis was born, a then three-year-old Charlotte melted hearts across the world in newly released pictures which showed her tending to the newborn. Order a plate of barbecue or a banh mi sandwich from one of the food trucks roaming the streets. From the diversity of our residents to our colorful history, which you’ll find represented in every corner, Charlotte is a melting pot.

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.

Following Emily’s death, it’s said that her dog Keeper mourned her loss. The dog followed Emily’s coffin to the grave and howled outside of Emily’s bedroom door for weeks after her death. Juliet Barker's The Brontës (Abacus, 2010) tells the story of the entire Brontë family, including Patrick and Branwell.

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.

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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