The Brontës were the world's most famous literary family and Haworth Parsonage, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, was their home from 1820 to 1861. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were the authors of some of the best-loved books in the English language. Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre (1847), Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847), and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) were written in this house over a hundred and fifty years ago, yet their power still moves readers today. To find two writers of genius in one family would be rare, but to find several writers in one household is unique in the history of literature. Charlotte and Emily are ranked among the world's greatest novelists; Anne is a powerful underrated author, and both their father, the Revd. Patrick Brontë, and brother Branwell also saw their own works in print. The Brontës, published under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, were acknowledged at the time for their directness and powerful emotional energy, qualities which were sometimes interpreted by the critics as 'coarse' and 'brutal'.

 

Surprisingly, the enduring myth of the Brontës living a life of unrelieved isolation and tragedy was, to some extent, created unintentionally by the Brontës themselves. 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 added to the legend in her 1850 Biographical Notice of her sisters. To protect Emily and Anne from the accusations of brutality levelled by the critics, Charlotte portrayed her sisters as unlearned, unworldly young women who wrote by instinct rather than design. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell was Charlotte's first biographer and she was responsible for perpetuating a wider knowledge of the Brontës' lives when she published The Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, two years after Charlotte's death. Gaskell's book, which stands today as one of the best biographical studies of its kind, was nevertheless approached from a novelist's perspective and it became a monument to what she perceived as Charlotte's tragedy of noble self-sacrifice to duty. Thus the Brontës were elevated to the mythic, heroic status which is so often applied to those who die young. The Brontë Parsonage Museum seeks to separate myth from reality and to present the known facts about the family.

 

Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were born at Thornton, near Bradford, but moved to the nearby township of Haworth when Charlotte, the eldest of the famous novelists, was barely five years old. The children's formative years and their mature writing careers were developed in Haworth, amid the dramatic landscape of the surrounding moors. Early biographers and critics sometimes assumed that the Brontës based their fiction exclusively on real life places, people and events, perhaps unwilling to accept that the daughters of a clergyman could produce what were often perceived as shocking, amoral books. However, this would be to deny the Brontës the power of imagination. The Parsonage was the home in which the young Brontës' creativity was nurtured, where they created their childhood lands of Angria and Gondal, and in which they served a collaborative literary apprenticeship of over twenty years prior to the publication of their novels. Like most authors, the Brontës drew upon their imaginations, on their personal experiences and the landscape and characters around them, but their mature poems and novels are also rooted in the themes of the early writings of their childhood and adolescence.

 

The Brontës occupied an unusual position in society, one which was to influence the themes of their novels. The Parsonage was amongst the largest houses in Haworth, though in comparison with the homes of clergymen in more affluent areas of Britain, it would have been considered small. Similarly, Patrick's annual income of around £200 was twenty times more than that of the average domestic servant, but the Brontës were poor in comparison with landowners or wealthy aristocrats whose income might exceed £10,000 or even £20,000. In the early nineteenth century, the class system was a much more rigid structure than today. The Brontës' 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. However, the Brontës could not afford to keep a carriage, to travel extensively, or to dress and furnish their home as did the upper classes and wealthy manufacturers of Yorkshire. It was essential that the Brontë girls earned a living, and their experiences as governesses, a social hinterland where they were neither family nor servant, informed much of their writing. Visiting the home in which these three remarkable women spent most of their lives provides a fascinating insight into the freedoms and restrictions of the time in which they lived and thus a deeper understanding of their novels.

 

 

 

Patrick and Maria Bronte had six children. The first child was Maria, who was born in 1814 and died on 6th June 1825. The second daughter, Elizabeth was born on 8th February 1815 and died shortly after Maria on 15th June 1825. Charlotte was the third daughter, born on 21st April 1816. Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls (born 1818) on 29th June 1854. Charlotte died on 31st March 1855. Arthur lived until 2nd December 1906. The first and only son born to Patrick and Maria was Patrick Branwell, who was born on 26th June 1817 and died on 24th September 1848. Emily Jane, the fourth daughter was born on 30th July 1818 and died on 19th December 1848. The sixth and last child was Anne, born on 17th January 1820 who died on 28th May 1849.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlotte's pleasure in her new-found success turned out to be shortlived. Branwell, who had increasingly fallen back on alcohol and opium for solace, had been ailing all summer. Tuberculosis was gaining a rapid hold on his abused frame. He died suddenly on Sunday 24 September 1848, aged thirty-one, with the whole family at his death-bed. While Charlotte was still reeling from the shock of Branwell's death, it became apparent that Emily and Anne were ill. In fact Emily was also dying from tuberculosis, and never left the house again after Branwell's funeral. Refusing to admit she was ill, she dragged herself out of bed every morning and continued to carry out her share of the household chores. Her death came at the age of thirty, three months after her brother's, on 19 December 1848. All Charlotte's concern was now directed towards her last-surviving sister, who seemed unable to shake off her cold. A lung specialist, called in to examine Anne shortly after Emily's death, confirmed Charlotte's worst fear, that she was likely to lose this last, much-loved sister.

Anne submitted to all the futile treatments then available, but any benefit proved to be temporary. In January 1849 Charlotte wrote: 'Anne cannot study now, she can scarcely read; she occupies Emily's chair - she does not get well.' 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. To spare her father the anguish of yet another family funeral, Charlotte took the decision to bury her sister in Scarborough, where she was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Mary's, high above the town. Stunned by the tragedies of the past nine months, Charlotte wrote: 'A year ago - had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849 - how stripped and bereaved I should have thought - this can never be endured'

Charlotte turned to her writing to sustain her through the dark days ahead. Her novel Shirley, begun before Branwell's death, was taken up once more. The novel was published in October 1849, and as winter approached, Charlotte fled Haworth to stay with George Smith and his mother in London. 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. During her London visit Charlotte was introduced to her literary idol, the novelist W. M. Thackeray, but the experience proved to be more of an ordeal than a pleasure.

Over the next few years there were more visits to London, on one of which she sat for her portrait to the society artist, George Richmond. As Charlotte's true identity gradually became known, her fame brought her a great deal of attention, and in August 1850 she was invited to the summer residence of Sir James and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth above Lake Windermere, where she met the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Later in the year, Smith, Elder & Co. gained permission from Newby to reprint Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. 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.

Charlotte's last novel, Villette, was published in 1853. At this time the atmosphere at the Parsonage was emotionally charged: Charlotte had rejected a marriage proposal from her father's Curate, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, and Patrick was incensed by the mere thought of the poor Irish Curate pursuing his famous daughter. What Charlotte saw as her father's unjust treatment worked in Nicholls' favour, and the couple were eventually married in Haworth Church on 29 June 1854. Though Charlotte had entered the married state with misgivings, she found unexpected happiness with Arthur.

The happiness did not last. Charlotte died on the morning of 31 March 1855, in the early stages of pregnancy, just three weeks before her thirty-ninth birthday. There were to be no direct descendants of the Brontës of Haworth. Patrick Brontë lived on at the Parsonage for a further six years, cared for by his son-in-law, and died there on 7 June 1861, at the age of eighty-four.

In 1857, two years after Charlotte's death, her first novel, The Professor, was finally published. In the same year Elizabeth Gaskell's moving tribute to her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, also appeared. This biography, along with Charlotte's Biographical Notice of her sisters, have become key sources for interpretations of the family, and have ensured that the story of the Brontës' lives continues to exert as much fascination as their fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tabitha Aykroyd: Domestic servant in the Brontë household.