A Yorkshire Miscellany by Tom Holman

Author:Tom Holman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FAMOUS YORKSHIRE FOLK - THE BRONTËS

On their own, either of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë would usually be ranked among the finest of all novelists - but together they are indisputably the first literary family of Yorkshire, if not of England.

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are all still widely read and endlessly adapted for TV or film, and, like their authors, they have their roots firmly in the Yorkshire countryside. All three Brontës were born in Thornton near Bradford - Charlotte in 1816, Emily in 1818 and Anne in 1820 - but moved to Haworth when they were young.

The Brontës endured the death of their mother in 1821, and of two older sisters in 1825. Their father, Patrick, had changed his Irish name from Brunty to the more impressive sounding Brontë, and despite a humble upbringing had become a published author as well as a respected reverend in several parishes across the north. His salary left the Brontës comfort able but never wealthy, but what education the children received was supplemented by lots of reading, writing and talking at home. Together with their only brother Branwell - himself a fair writer - they created imaginary worlds and soaked up ideas for the people, places and stories of their future books from Haworth and its surroundings.

Anne and Charlotte trained to become governesses, which at the time was one of the few career options for women educated enough to be accepted into well-to-do families but without a fortune of their own. They didn’t enjoy the work, but all three Brontës kept up their writing and in 1846 used an inheritance to pay for the publication of some of their poems. Though it failed to sell, the next year was the breakthrough one for the sisters, bringing Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Published under the androgynous pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, there was immediate speculation about the identity of their authors.

The Brontës didn’t have long to enjoy their success. Emily died from tuberculosis the following year, aged just 30 and a few months after Branwell. By now Anne was poorly too, and she died in May 1849 in Scarborough, to where she had gone for a sea cure. Charlotte had lost three siblings in eight months. Returning to her writing, she found her fame spreading and her anonymity disappearing. She published two more novels, Shirley and Villette, but less than a year after her marriage to a curate of her father’s, she too died, in 1855, aged 39. Patrick Brontë had outlived all six of his children, himself dying at Haworth in 1861.

Two years after Charlotte’s death, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography of her, helping to fan the public’s interest in all three Brontë novelists. Their early deaths, leaving only a handful of novels, fuelled Gaskell’s image of the trio as brilliant but doomed talents, and the fascination with their lives continues. Haworth receives thousands of Brontë tourists each year, and their first stop is the family’s home, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

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