Novelists 23 The Brontes

The Brontës were a 19th century literary family associated with the village of Haworth, high on the Yorkshire moors. The sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849), are well known as poets and novelists. They originally published using masculine pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). Their stories immediately attracted attention, though not always the best, for their passion and originality. Charlotte's Jane Eyre was the first to know success, while Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and other works (Charlotte's Villette, Anne's Agnes Grey) were later to be accepted as masterpieces of literature.

The three sisters and brother, Patrick Branwell (1817-1848), who also wrote, were very close and they developed their childhood imaginations through the collaborative writing of increasingly complex stories. The confrontation with the deaths first of their mother then two older sisters marked them profoundly and influenced their writing. Their fame at first was due as much to their own tragic destinies as to their precociousness. Since their early deaths, then the death of rector father Patrick in 1861, they were subject to a following that did not cease to grow. Their home, the parsonage at Haworth, is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum and is a mecca for visitors the world over. A recent article reprinted in Evangelical Times said of Anne that she "shines out among them all as a genuine trophy of saving grace". One of her hymns is in Grace Hymns (Believe not those who say). I have enjoyed the older women's best known novels but have never got round to the other works.