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The Brontë Family

Following in the footsteps of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, were the next generation of female writers. Unlike Austen, they were northerners, born and raised in West Yorkshire, England. There were also two other sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who sadly died at the ages of 10 and 11 from tuberculosis, and a brother, Branwell, who became an artist and poet, fuelled by his opium and alcohol addiction.

Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) had three novels published in her lifetime, but it is for Jane Eyre (1847) that she is most celebrated. Her sister, Emily Brontë (1818–48), is lauded for her only novel Wuthering Heights (1847) – a complex tragedy, spanning two generations, that expresses the mess that people can make of their lives when needs and desires are allowed to control their actions and reactions, as opposed to common sense and restraint.

Anne Brontë (1820–49) is the lesser known of the sisters. She published two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Unlike her sisters, Anne’s style was one of realism rather than romanticism, making her the more contemporary writer at the time.

All three sisters used pen names (Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell respectively), as it was common at that time for female novelists to adopt male pseudonyms in an effort to be taken more seriously. Indeed, another well-known female author, George Eliot (1818–80), had the real name of Mary Ann Evans. The reputation of the female novelist at the time was uncertain, and it seems that Jane Austen herself may have prompted this practice.

The surname Brontë wasn’t wholly genuine, either. Their father, Patrick, had originally been known as ‘Brunty’, a name he is believed to have claimed for reasons of insecurity and vanity, as an unusual name gave the illusion of continental sophistication and heritage.

Sadly, the Brontë sisters all had short lives, and fragile health characterized the entire family. Two years after the death of Charlotte, her friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography of the elder Brontë that created the impression of a family beset by misfortune.

Charlotte Brontë

As a focused woman with a great deal of determination, Charlotte originally wrote in order to secure financial independence for herself and her siblings. She spent periods of time away from her family home, at boarding school in her youth and later as a governess, giving her invaluable experiences to draw upon. Following the death of Anne from pulmonary tuberculosis, Charlotte’s success with the publication of Jane Eyre prompted her to reveal her true identity and name. She frequently travelled to London and became acquainted with a number of prominent figures of the age. Her book was seen as a seminal work, introducing the idea that women could achieve their desires by demonstrating strength of character. In 1854, Charlotte was married to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She became pregnant, but fell ill and died with child.

The Professor

These days the word ‘professor’ tends to conjure the image of a white-haired, unkempt and eccentric university academic. However, the professor in Charlotte’s novel is young, dashing and a bit of a ladies’ man. The story is loosely based on the author’s experience as a teacher in Brussels, Belgium, and she imagines herself falling in love with her perfect man: a professor at the same school. Charlotte wrote The Professor before Jane Eyre, but failed to publish it in her own lifetime, as it wasn’t deemed good enough. It was eventually published in 1857, two years after her death.

The Brontë family was Protestant and had an innate mistrust of the Catholic Church, and, as such, The Professor deals with Christian division and class prejudice. In effect, Charlotte wrote her good characters as Protestants and her baddies as Catholics, which suited the general mindset of Victorian England. The Brontë family was poor, and Charlotte had a chip on her shoulder about the lack of social standing and esteem that resulted through lack of wealth and connections. In The Professor, her central characters find themselves in that same position. The novel is fundamentally a treatise on the plight of good, honest and modest Protestants in a world dominated by untrustworthy, duplicitous and empowered Catholics.

Many critics have intimated that The Professor should have remained unpublished because it was only a prototype that she herself had consigned to the old projects’ drawer. Its purpose was more an exercise in learning the art of writing a successful novel, rather than actually being that itself. After the magnificent Jane Eyre, The Professor was always viewed as an inferior effort. However, today the story is regarded as part of the Brontë anthology. Just as there is a trend for releasing demonstration recordings of songs for completists, so The Professor is thought of as a kind of demo novel – a point of access into the mind of a novelist who was yet perfect her craft.

Common Themes

Today, the novels of the Brontë sisters are a large part of English literary history. Their styles were quite individual, but all three were able to use prose to communicate with the world beyond the sanctuary of home and there is a thread of commonality in their world view that speaks volumes about the relative isolation they experienced during their upbringing. Their father was a bookish man who seemed not to worry about the effects of solitude on his children. The result was that they grew up to be quite introverted, which was probably why they found company in each other and in their imaginations. They were well-educated individuals, though with relatively little by way of fiscal wealth and reserved in nature. It was considered highly unusual then, as it would be now, for three sisters to all devote their lives to writing novels.

The Brontë sisters were all seemingly preoccupied with thoughts of tortuous relationships and uncertain endings. It was as if they knew they were destined for lives cut short by illness – understandable, given the early deaths of their two elder sisters and the death of their mother, Maria, in 1821, all by the time the three sisters were teenagers. Charlotte died at the age of 38 from complications in pregnancy, having married only the year before. Emily and Anne died of consumption at the ages of 30 and 29, respectively. And even their brother Branwell died young, at the age of 31, also from consumption. In the absence of children of their own, their novels became the Brontë offspring, living on in perpetuity. Patrick outlived his entire family, dying at the impressive age of 84, in 1861.

Like Jane Austen before them, the Brontës existed on the fringes of polite society, where they could observe people and capture their personalities in prose. This made them well suited to writing, but unattractive as potential spouses for eligible young men or inclusion in certain social circles. That marginalization, in itself, gave rise to frustrations, desires and needs that must have fuelled their creative drive. Their novels act as vehicles for self-expression, alluding to their misgivings about life and providing them with strong voices for the plight of females in the 19th century.

The Brontë Legacy

For the three sisters, writing was clearly a way of living vicariously. Their social environment was such that they had rather limited experience of the outside world. Their father was a teacher and clergyman, who kept a tight rein on his daughters and one son, for fear of also losing them. Tragically, he did lose them all before any had reached the age of 40, but not before his three daughters had tasted success as published novelists.

Charlotte and Emily used their novels to effectively live other lives, and they are often described as romanticists as a result. Anne did the same, but in a less imaginative frame, so that her scenarios were less removed from reality. The year 1847 was the most eventful period of time for the Brontë sisters, as it saw all three of their aforementioned novels published – Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.

The fictitious Jane Eyre could easily be translated as Charlotte imagining herself in a scenario where she comes from a background far worse than her own, but ends up living a life that is more rounded and fulfilled than the one she leads, reinventing herself in prose. Emily goes even further, with Wuthering Heights. She imagines different versions of herself living through an epic story of tragedy. It seems she was able to act out longed-for adventure in the theatre of her imagination. Anne’s Agnes Grey shows an obvious overlap between Anne and Agnes, so that a blend of fact and fiction is evident. Anne was more concerned with using her prose to express the real trials and tribulations of her life as a governess, as opposed to using them as a form of escapism, like her sisters.

In a way, the cumulative result of the Brontës’ work is to demonstrate the depths to which fictional prose can be used as a form of self-expression. All three sisters transported themselves into their imagined worlds, but to differing extremes. However, because of their early deaths, it is impossible to know how their individual preferences might have adapted and matured over time.

The social impact and legacy of the Brontës’ work was that it dared to be truthful and self-indulgent in an age when polite society was reserved and reticent about emotions and desires. While Jane Austen’s work described the lives of people somewhat removed from an environment most people would consider familiar, the Brontës described the lives of people who were more human, in that they were not as bound by rules of etiquette and prescribed behaviour. It wasn’t necessary to read between the lines to understand the allegory, because the Brontës wrote from the heart in a new and honest way, heightening people’s idea of the very purpose of literature as an art form.